To find out the space used by a table we can use sp_spaceused procedure. Most of the times sp_spaceused will give correct information. Why do I say most of the time? Well consider this example. I just inserted a large amount of data in Orders table in Northwind database and ran sp_spaceused.
EXEC sp_spaceused ‘Orders’
which returns [...]

The title says it all.
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Every object in SQL Server database has an Object Id which is used extensively by SQL Server for most operations. There are times when we would like to know what the object ID is for a particular object. In this example I will show you two ways to retrieve Object Id. My examples will retrieve [...]

In this walkthrough I will show you how to use Red Gate SQL Data Generator to generate test data for a database. While writing software which interacts with a database developers often write scripts to insert some data. Usually this data is not big enough to find performance bottlenecks and/or issues with presenting data on [...]

This script returns all default constraints on a table in a SQL Server 2008 database. It gives me the name and definition of the constraints on Person.Address table in Adventure Works database. You can substitute the table name with any other table to get the constraints for that table.
SELECT [name],
[...]

In this post I will document my experience of installing Oracle SOA Suite on Windows XP. No I am not switching and I’m still a Microsoft developer by heart. But I do feel that for me to improve my craft I must also understand how things are done in other camps such as Oracle, SUN, [...]

.NET Framework provides classes which give information about the machine on which code is executed. One Such class is System.Environment which gives us things like Machine Name, OS Version and much more. I recently had a requirement to programmatically detect the number of Processors on a machine. I thought this was a simple enough task. [...]

This one always gets me off guard so I’m posting this here for more than anything else to remind me. The issue occurs when you configure your MOSS environment which is normally done after installing MOSS. The issue is that while inserting sample data the wizard throws an error which says “Failed to create sample [...]

In SQL Server 2008 you can find if a database is online of offline by querying databases system view. A simple query such as this one gives me a list of all databases on my server and the second column shows if the database is online or offline.

SELECT Name, state_desc
FROM sys.databases

On my server [...]

SQL Server by default follows Windows password policy requirements for SQL Server Login accounts. This forces you to follow the same policy for SQL Server logins as you would for windows logins and this is a good thing. But sometimes you want to bypass that validation maybe to get a test login in place. You [...]

If you are creating a SQL Server login using a script then it is advisable to check if the login you are creating already exists. If you do not do this then SQL Server will throw an error. For example if I execute this statement when a login with name test_user already exists, I will [...]

Database Mail configuration settings can be retrieved using sysmail_help_configure_sp stored procedure. Like other database mail object, this stored procedure also resides in msdb database. Running the stored procedure on my machine gives the following results.

sysmail_help_configure_sp