Time for another episode of the SQL Friday, The Best SQL Server Links Of The Past Week show.

Here is what I found interesting this past week in SQL Land:

Understanding backups and log-related Trace Flags in SQL Server 20002005 and 2008

Kimberly Tripp is giving a play by play from 2000 to 20052008 to discuss the differences and what’s changed and why those changes were significant. The biggest changes were between 2000 and 2005.

Business Rule Enforcement

Louis Davidson explains how to enforce business rules and what the difficulty is

LINQ to SQL: The ongoing Developer/DBA debate

Jonathan Kehayias shows us what he thinks of LINQ to SQL

Who is Active? v7.30

Adam Machanic has released the latest version of his Who is Active script. Who is Active? is a comprehensive DMV-based monitoring script, designed to tell you at a glance what processes are active on your SQL Server and what they’re up to. It has a number of optional features so that you can get results quickly, or monitor deeply, depending on your needs when you happen to be using the script.

Sp_indexinfo has been updated

Tibor Karaszi has updated his Sp_indexinfo procedure

This procedure will give you the following info:

  • What indexes exists for a particular table or for each table in the database
  • Clustered, non-clustered or heap
  • Columns in the index
  • Included columns in the index
  • Unique or nonunique
  • Number rows in the table
  • Space usage
  • How frequently the indexes has been used
  • Any obvious indexes I should add?

Digging Around in SQL Internals – View Page Data

Michelle Ufford wrote a post about using DBCC Page and sys.system_internals_allocation_units to view page data

How to copy DTS 2000 packages between servers (and from SQL 2000 to SQL 2005 and SQL 2008)

The PSS SQL Server Engineers show us how to migrate SQL Server 2000 DTS packages to a SQL 2005 Server without upgrading them, thus leaving them as legacy DTS 2000 packages within SQL 2005

Estimated and Actual execution plan revisited

Gail Shaw explains why the terms ‘estimated execution plan’ and ‘actual execution plan’ are perhaps a little bit misleading.

That is it for this week, I will tag the weekly posts with SQL Friday in case you want to see the whole archive in the future

*** If you have a SQL related question try our Microsoft SQL Server Programming forum or our Microsoft SQL Server Admin forum