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:
A DBA utility database in every SQL Server instance?
Linchi Shea writes: I was reading Louis Davidson’s post earlier today, and what he said below caught my attention:
I am a big believer in having the database be as self contained as possible, so I try to put [maintenance] objects and such in the database, typically in a schema named utility.
This is different from what I typically do, and got me wondering how people out there managing their maintenance objects. I typically store all the maintenance objects in a dedicated database on every SQL Server instance across the enterprise
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SQL Server: What is a COLD, DIRTY or CLEAN Buffer?]2**
What is clean buffer? What is cold buffer cache? The PSS SQL Server Engineers explain the difference
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Set based calculation of products of several numbers**
Alexander Kuznetsov shows us how we can use use SUM to calculate the sum of several numbers, but you cannot directly use set-based logic to calculate a product. Yet there is a very simple trick – you can use EXP(SUM(LOG(…))) and get a product of several numbers without a loop
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

Denis has been working with SQL Server since version 6.5. Although he worked as an ASP/JSP/ColdFusion developer before the dot com bust, he has been working exclusively as a database developer/architect since 2002. In addition to English, Denis is also fluent in Croatian and Dutch, but he can curse in many other languages and dialects (just ask the SQL optimizer) He lives in Princeton, NJ with his wife and three kids.