In today's column we'll demonstrate how and when to use the new TSQL MERGE statement and how this can be a helpful addition to your toolbox.

Learn how to define policies and use them to better manage your SQL Server 2008 instances.

This article was written mainly for developers who use Firebird Embedded SQL Server in .Net framework applications and want to speed up or optimize DB queries. We will describe how to create your own native Firebird extension and show some approaches how to use it in managed code applications.

By Dee Quang - Ever get confused by or dislike using the SQL Server Integration Services deployment wizard? Learn how to manually deploy the packages to SQL Server 2005 and configure the packages in a multitude of ways as well.

The people at Microsoft are busy with lots of products. Did someone forget that they should be excited about them?

Follow an experiment and draw interesting conclusions on where and when to use temporary tables or table variables.

In the last of this three-part SQL Server Reporting Services recipe series, Wrox author Paul Turley shows how to create the graphics for word-size graphics that visualization pioneer Edward Tufte dubbed sparklines.

If you're haven't used CodeSmith for your TSQL coding yet, now's the time. This template-based code generator enables you to add fire-and-forget programming to your TSQL development.

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition provides relational database functionality for mobile and desktop applications through a lightweight and easily distributable engine. Take a look under the hood.

Learn how to conquer a SQL Express 2005 remote connection issue.

Did you replace MSDE with SQL Server 2005 Express Edition? Did you make the wrong move?

Learn how the Service Broker provides the "plumbing" to let you pass messages between applications, using SQL Server as the transport mechanism.

SQL Server Management Studio just doesn't cut it for complicated configuration and monitoring implementations. Learn how to implement your own SQL Service Broker (SSB) control bus solution to serve the needs of complex SQL Server-based messaging solutions.

You can leverage SQL 2005 Server Service Broker with existing technologies such as SQL Server 2000 and MSMQ. BizTalk and SSB external activation are viable options, but a simple polling solution is easier.

Learn about a pair of stored procedures that can dump all users, role memberships, and permissions in a database, or copy them from one database to another.

Utilizing design patterns with SQL Server 2005 Service Broker enables you to assess and select appropriate solutions for all of your SQL Server 2005 asynchronous messaging needs.

Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 (MOM) is a very capable monitoring tool, but it's limited when it comes to quality assurance. Learn how to use WMI and MOM's rules and notification capabilities to run automated data warehouse QA checks.

When handling a project with hundreds of tables, it takes some time to understand the flows. Learn how to create a simple tool for Visualizing database tables and relations.

There is a plethora of new T-SQL features and enhancements in SQL Server 2005. Learn about one of them — specifically, Common Table Expressions (CTE), because they often come in handy.

Table-valued user-defined functions (UDFs) are functionally similar to views but structurally similar to stored procedures, giving them all the important features of views and stored procedures and some additional functionality that they lack.

In ASP.NET 2.0, you can customize the session state store as per your requirement. Explore one of the scalable and reliable approaches for storing session variables—SQL Server.

Need to gather some metrics on the steps within your BizTalk 2004 Orchestration? Check out Business Activity Monitoring (BAM).

Learn how to extend SQL Server 2005 Integration Services (SSIS), the new ETL tool that ships with SQL Server 2005, to perform operations that aren't already bundled with the product.

When you write to an underlying table via a CLR database object, a number of questions come up. Get the answers—along with a breakdown of how System.Transactions, a new .NET namespace, can help.

Get an introduction to the extended SQL Server 2005 trigger functionality that Data Definition Language (DDL) triggers provide for both databases and servers.