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[Focus]

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Awards Recognizee the Best of TechEd Developers 2008
For our seventh annual awards issue, our judges traveled to Orlando to take a close look at the finalists in our Best of TechEd awards process and bring you the top third-party SQL Server development products. The envelope, please!
 — Jeff James


SQL Server Magazine Editors' Best Awards 2008
After many sleepless nights, our editors have compiled the best products of 2008 in 12 categories, including Product of the Year. Find out who earned the highest honors in our annual Editors' Best awards.
 — Editors

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[Features]

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Coming Home to Windows Home Server, Part 1
A new column begins, focusing on Microsoft's highly touted Windows Home Server.
 — Eric B. Rux

Coming Home to Windows Home Server, Part 2
Learn how WHS simplifies and automates the thorough backup of your home systems.
 — Eric B. Rux


Digging into SSMS
Explore some lesser-known SQL Server Management Studio features that can help you better manage queries, organize scripts and other task resources, and report database and server statistics.
 — Roman Rehak


Introducing Excel Services for SharePoint
Among the most useful changes to Microsoft Excel 2007 is Excel Services, which lets businesses share spreadsheets across the enterprise by moving the heavy lifting and security off the local desktop and into a server environment.
 — Paul R. Vaughn


Sharpen Your Basic SQL Server Skills

 — Pinalkumar Dave


SQL Server Profiler or Server-Side Trace?
Did you know that using SQL Server Profiler can have an impact on the performance of your production servers? Check out these test results comparing SQL Server Profiler with a server-side trace.
 — Andrew J. Kelly


T-SQL 101, Lesson 6
Creating a table "the old fashioned way" leads to a better understanding of the table and its columns. Plus, the resulting T-SQL code documents the table's structure and lets you easily recreate the table.
 — Bill McEvoy


Visual Studio .NEXT Wish List
Love Visual Studio 2008? Hardly. The author points out where Microsoft needs to fix VS 2008's shortcomings such as the inability to access the new SQL Server data types of ADO.NET features.
 — William Vaughn

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[Editorial]

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Migrating to SQL Server 2008
Now that Microsoft supports direct migration from SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2008, you must decide: Should I migrate from SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005, or should I migrate directly to SQL Server 2008?
 — Michael Otey

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[Reader to Reader]

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Find and Replace Keywords in Stored Procedures
Having to modify stored procedures when an object name changes can be tedious. Here's a T-SQL stored procedure that eliminates the tedium from this task.
 — Readers


Find Any String in Any SQL Code in Any Database
This T-SQL stored procedure searches all the databases on your server for the string you specify and returns a list of the objects that contain it.
 — Readers


Use a Stored Procedure to Move User Tables Between File Groups
Here's a T-SQL stored procedure that finds and moves the clustered-indexes user tables you specify from old file groups to new file groups.
 — Eli Leiba

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[Solutions by Design]

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Indexing the Data Warehouse
Learn the best way to index the dimensions, and fact tables, and staging databases in your data warehouse to reduce query response time.
 — Michelle A. Poolet

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[T-SQL Black Belt]

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SQL Server 2008’s HierarchyID, Part 2
Use the new HIERARCHYID data type to move a subtree from one parent location in the hierarchy to another, and to convert a parent-child representation of the hierarchy to a representation that uses the HIERARCHYID data type.
 — Itzik Ben-Gan

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[SELECT TOP(X)]

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T-SQL Enhancements in SQL Server 2008
Tour SQL Server 2008’s extended T-SQL feature set and learn how the new statements DECLARE, MERGE, and INSERT can make a DBA’s job easier.
 — Michael Otey

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[Tool Time with Kevin Kline]

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MSSQL Blocks and Orphan Finder
Check out two SQL Server tools that help you find locking and blocking problems in your SQL Server instances, as well as records that have values in the foreign key column of your database tables that don't exist in the parent table.
 — Kevin Kline

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[Sqlmag.com Community Dialog]

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Videos and Reader Comments Give Sqlmag.com Readers Online Help
Stay tuned for videos from SQL Server experts on ITTV.net, and be on the lookout for helpful nuggets of information in online article comments on Sqlmag.com.
 — Anne Grubb