---

[Focus]

---

Unit-Test Your Stored Procedures
You're the one on the front lines; who better to drill your code to peak performance? Here's why and how to put stored procedures through their paces.
 — Dan Sawyer

---

[Features]

---

Automatic Pilot
Manually customizing replication agent job steps speeds up snapshot replication, but it's impractical for a large-scale environment. Learn how to automate this customization in the last article of a three-part series.
 — Herts Chen


Introducing Poormon
Monitoring software for SQL Server can be costly. But you can implement a “poor-man’s” monitoring solution and view SQL Server performance data on the Web.
 — Mark Solomon


Much ADO About Nothing
Developers need to know how to test for and set NULL values in their applications. Here are some tried-and-true techniques you can use in Visual Basic and Visual Basic .NET.
 — William Vaughn

---

[SQL Server Savvy]

---

License All Your Processors
You have to license all your processors, even if you aren't using all of them to run SQL Server.
 — Brian Moran


Use Extended Properties to Create a Data Dictionary
SQL Server 2000's extended properties let you define and manipulate user-defined properties. You can use these user-defined properties to create a homegrown data dictionary.
 — Brian Moran


Use GROUP BY to Transform Tables
To transform tables, Brian Moran explores a handy trick that uses the GROUP BY clause.
 — Brian Moran

---

[Editorial]

---

A New Language
None of SQL Server’s upcoming programming-productivity enhancements will have more impact on DBAs than the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR). This new capability begs the question, “Which .NET language should DBAs learn?”
 — Michael Otey

---

[Reader to Reader]

---

Hidden Power of UNION
Think UNION is useful only for combining results from different sources? This tip shows that using UNION is sometimes the quickest way to select from just one table.
 — Readers

---

[SQL Seven]

---

Past, Present, and Future
Michael Otey revisits SQL Server’s six major releases, then looks to the future and the upcoming Yukon release.
 — Michael Otey

---

[Inside SQL Server]

---

Text Pointers
Large data objects can be tricky to store and even trickier to access again. Here are some pointers that can help you make sense of it all.
 — Kalen Delaney

---

[T-SQL Black Belt]

---

Counting the Costs
You can use date and time manipulations for calculating call costs across different rate periods as long as you stick to the basics.
 — Itzik Ben-Gan

---

[Answers from Microsoft]

---

Adding Columns to Replicated Tables
How can you add a column to a replicated table without reinitializing the entire publication? The SQL Server Development Team has an answer.
 — Microsoft's SQL Server Development Team


Automating Defragmentation
Manually checking and defragmenting your database's tables can be a laborious process. Here's how you can eliminate fragmentation from the start and how to automate defragmentation when you need it.
 — Microsoft's SQL Server Development Team


Dividing an Update into Batches
Here's how to use the ROWCOUNT setting to divide a long update into batches and maintain good performance.
 — Microsoft's SQL Server Development Team

---

[Exploring XML]

---

OpenXML's @mp:id Meta-property
Inserting hierarchical data from an XML document into relational tables that have primary key/foreign key relationships can be difficult. Read on to see how you can use OpenXML's @mp:id meta-property to overcome the challenge.
 — Rich Rollman

---

[Letters]

---

Letters, February 2003
Readers write in about the difference between the smallint and tinyint data types and about being sensitive to case in code.
 — Various Authors

---

[New Products]

---

New Products, February 2003
Check out the latest SQL Server-related new and improved products.
 — Carolyn Mader