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[Focus]

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For Your Eyes Only
Concerns about legislation regarding personal privacy have DBAs searching for solutions that SQL Server doesn’t support natively. With this example solution, you can secure your database row by row and satisfy the most stringent privacy requirements.
 — Sean Maloney


Under Wraps
The pressure's on to keep customer data private, but your organization can still use its valuable collection of customer information--and even make money from it. Just follow these basic steps, and you and your customers can rest secure.
 — Brian Connolly

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[Features]

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Beating the Odds
A well-designed data warehouse can help your organization make faster and more informed decisions, but data-warehousing projects are risky business. Here's why so many data-warehousing projects fail and how to increase your project's chances for success.
 — Craig Utley


Beyond T-SQL: Digging into the CLR
Creating this sample credit card encryption application can teach you a lot about the realities of building, testing, and deploying CLR-based stored procedures--and about how the CLR provides functionality that T-SQL can't.
 — William Vaughn

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[SQL Server Savvy]

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Finding File-Creation Time
SQL Server doesn't store file-creation times in the system tables. However, if you have a database file's full name you can acquire the file's creation time by using xp_getfiledetails.
 — Brian Moran


Insert Speed and Select Performance, Too
If you're careful, you can have your cake and eat it, too. I've found a way to achieve high insert throughput rates without significantly damaging my ability to handle read queries at the same time.
 — Brian Moran


Pageiolatch Values in Sysprocesses
Pageiolatch_sh is a shared latch of the generic class pageiolatch. A pageiolatch_sh value identifies a connection that's waiting on SQL Server to read a particular page from disk into memory that's available to the SQL Server buffer pool.
 — Brian Moran

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[Editorial]

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The Broadening of BI
As the range of activities categorized as BI stretches into new areas, your organization might already be participating in BI projects—and you don’t even know it.
 — Michael Otey

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[Inside SQL Server]

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Optimizing Variables and Parameters
Help the query optimizer determine the best execution plan by clearly identifying variables and understanding parameters.
 — Kalen Delaney

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[T-SQL Black Belt]

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More UDF Back Doors
Take a look at these back doors to nondeterministic T-SQL functions before they close, and peek in a side door that lets you modify data through inline UDFs.
 — Itzik Ben-Gan

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[New Products]

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New Products, July 2004
Check out the latest SQL Server-related new and improved products.
 — Dawn Cyr

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[SELECT TOP(X)]

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ASP.NET Resource Kit
The top four features in Microsoft’s new ASP.NET Resource Kit.
 — Michael Otey

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[Lessons from the Field]

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Supercharged Synchronization
For high performance, bidirectional transactional replication has no equal--if you can get around several limitations.
 — Bren Newman