Computer Associates used to recommend excluding particular processes and directories from eTrust anti-virus scanning.  This, I found, was very important with Microsoft SQL Server, as it would cause a significant performance hit.

You would do this via setting the following registry keys, under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ComputerAssociates\eTrustITM\CurrentVersion\Realtime

szExcludeProcessNames

(more…)

In my current job, I get to write data extracts.
eg. extract data from an SQL database, using Microsoft Access as the front-end. Not my preferred tool, but it’s what I’ve got.

Thought it would be useful to brush up on my T-SQL, so I purchased the book on the right.

Best darn little book I’ve found on Transaction SQL. The 10 minutes refers to each lesson. And there are 30 lessons all up. This will be a book which I’d going to end up using as a quick reference.

Now if you want to teach yourself T-SQL, I’d suggest the following:

1. Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft SQL Server T-SQL
2. SQL Server 2005 Express Edition with Advanced Services
3. .Net Framework version 2
   (if you don’t already have it)
4. Membership of SqlServerCentral.com (it’s free), the question of the day is worth it for knowledge reinforcement.

Update August 2009:
Writing SQL Queries: Let’s Start with the Basics, by Microsoft is worth reading as well.

SQL Server 2008 Backup Compression
- by Varun Dhawan, over at MSDN blogs.

It’s a useful option for saving space with backing up to disk, but I would disagree with the guy over tape backup savings.

Some tape units have built-in hardware compression which already compresses the data being stored on tape.
Which means there is no advantage in compressing data if you are going to be writing it straight to tape.

As I found when testing compressing large ISAM databases back in the 90’s.  The data was already compressed so the tape drive couldn’t compress any further.

So the answer is:
Yes, if backing up to disk.
No, if backing up straight to tape.

Details on tape compression from an old Sony FAQ:

Q: What is the tape capacity of the SDT- 5000/5200 tape drive?

A: With the SDT-5000, tape capacity will vary depending on the length of the tape and whether hardware compression is enabled as follows:

NOTE: The SDT-5200 supports native capacity only.
The typical performance of the compression IC in the SDT-5000 drive is shown in the following table:

As the table indicates, the more random the data is, the less compression is possible. This is due to the fact that data compression operates on the principle of reducing the redundancy in the date string and random data has very little redundancy.