Art of SQL

I’ve had numerous ideas that I, at one time or another, felt impelled to blog about but, in all honesty, they’ve been more of examples of how I’ve corrected other’s ”creative” (aka bad) SQL code that I’ve run across in my career. To me, that kind of work boils down to common sense and utilizing tuning skills to refactor a poor query into something better. But there is nothing much special about that to me, it’s just what I do most days of the week. This time I wanted to do something difficult with a view to extending my skill set in a rarely tapped area…

SQL Server’s undocumented commands for the database transaction log and how to leverage them!

Here are some of the things you can do with this knowledge:

• Add change-tracking to your database for a custom ETL solution.
• Add your own CDC to capture record change history.
• The ability to rollback transactions already committed to the log.

Just to forewarn you, this will be a basic overview in getting what you want from the transaction log and just that. How to write an application on the above possibilities depends on how you want to apply this information.

Over the next number of weeks I will be starting off with the basics related to SQL Server 2000 and how to read writes committed to the log!

Part 1 can be found here.