Tag: linked server

SQL Server Database Tables Export and Import Methods

Ahmad Yaseen Leave a comment
Total: 8 Average: 4.1

When working as a SQL Server database administrator or developer, you cannot live in your isolated SQL Server world without communicating with other data sources. For example, there is rarely a day when you won’t be requested to import data from an Excel, Access or CSV file into your SQL Server table. Or, conversely, export one of your SQL Server database tables to an external file in order for this table to be used in another database engine or to be analyzed externally by the corresponding team.

SQL Server provides us with a number of methods that can be used to export an existing SQL Server database table to an Excel or text file, and import data from an external data source to a new or existing SQL Server database table. In this article, we will gradually cover all these methods.

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Monitoring Backups Across Instances

Kenneth Igiri Leave a comment
Total: 11 Average: 3.9

Introduction

In the last two or three months, I have been asked twice for a solution native to SQL Server that consolidates a backup report for several SQL Server instances across an enterprise. This question came from friends that did not necessarily want to spend money buying a tool but were more inclined to leverage the capabilities of SQL Server. I have thought about two possible ways to achieve this:

  1. Using Linked Servers, catalog views, SQL Agent Jobs and Database Mail
  2. Using Central Management Server

In this article, I will demonstrate the first and hope we shall have a second part of the article sometime later. Read More

32-bit Excel and 64-bit SQL Server

Alexey Shulenin 1 Comment
Total: 4 Average: 2.8

What could be simpler than to get data from an Excel table in SQL Server?

There are many ways to accomplish this task. You can utilize Integration Services (former DTS) or import and export wizard, which is the same under the hood. Another way is to create a simple ADO.NET app. You can use the Linked Server mechanism, which allows you to see any ODBC / OLE DB-reachable object in the form of a table (a collection of tables) or the result of an ad hoc query.

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Working with SQL Server in Hybrid Cloud Scenarios

Alexey Shulenin Leave a comment
Total: 4 Average: 3

A hybrid cloud is a fairly attractive model when implementing cloud computing in enterprise information systems since this approach combines the advantages of public and private clouds. On the one hand, it is possible to flexibly attract external resources when needed and reduce infrastructure costs. On the other hand, full control over data and applications that the enterprise does not want to outsource remains. However, in such a scenario, we inevitably face the task of integrating data from various sources. Suppose there is a table with customers, which is vertically divided into two parts. The depersonalized part was allocated in a public cloud, and the information personalizing the customers remained in a local database. For holistic processing inside the application, you need to combine both parts by CustomerID. There are various ways to do this. Conventionally, they can be divided into two large categories: data aggregation at the on-premise database server level which, in this case, will be a single sign on for accessing local and remote data, and data aggregation within the business logic. This article will consider the first approach.

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Pitfalls of Linked Server Usage

Anatoliy Kotelevets Leave a comment
Total: 5 Average: 3.4

An interesting project related to the task queue processing come to the company I work for. It was previously developed by another team. We needed to detect and resolve issues that occurred at high load on the queue.

In short, the project consisted of several databases and applications located on different servers. A ‘Task’ in the given project is a stored procedure or a .NET application. Correspondingly, the ‘task’ must be performed on a certain database and on a certain server.

All queue-related data is stored on the dedicated server. As for the servers at which tasks must be performed, they store only metadata. That is, procedures, functions, and service data related to this server. All task-related data comes from a Linked Server. Read More

Retrieving SQL Server Metadata with Help of T-SQL

Andrey Langovoy 2 Comments
Total: 3 Average: 4
This article contains a list of scripts that mine the SQL Server metadata in the various system functions, stored procedures, tables, and catalog views. Metadata queries are really helpful in discovering information for a given database schema. You can copy all the T-SQL scripts that are listed in this article and use for your own purposes. However, please do some tests before apply to a production database.

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