Many times when working on customer's hosts I've had windows restart messages popup with a timer!  Sometimes they were hidden in the background and the timer counted down to just...

A simple circular reference would be where Table A self references A or Tables A and B reference each other.  A complex circular reference would be where table A references...

Here is something to get you started.  It doesn't find complex circular refs but you can remove those if you know what they are.

-- Get...

Having several foreign keys in a table is like having multiple parent inheritance.  There may be many-to-many relationships where many referencing tables are linked to many referenced tables.

The...

Most all hard drives support S.M.A.R.T technology which monitors parameters of a drive and predict when a failure may occur.  Wikipedia or Tom's Hardware are good sites for information on...

Interesting post!

It seems strange to run in SIMPLE mode and risk losing a full day of work.  Is that because your database is mostly just computing some answers...

As developers, we are consumers of Microsoft's services.  Those services are likely already in commercial products before being released generally.  My car has voice command and bluetooth so I can...

You still need to represent zero.  Using A-J as 0-9, you could represent 10 as BA and 11 as BB.  That would drastically shorten your REPLACE list and thus your...

Base 10 consists of numbers 0 through 9.  How do you want to handle tens, hundreds, etc.  What are you trying to accomplish?

Here are 3386 pairs of FirstName/NickNames

Aaron,Erin
Aaron,Ron
Aaron,Ronnie
Aaron,Ronny
Abel,Ab
Abel,Abe
Abel,Abie
Abel,Eb
Abel,Ebbie
Abiah,Ab
Abiah,Abijah
Abiah,Biah
Abiel,Ab
Abiel,Biel
Abigail,Abbie
Abigail,Abby
Abigail,Gail
Abigail,Nabby
Abner,Ab
Abner,Abbie
Abraham,Abe
Abraham,Abie

As I've had to do this on many projects, I will share my past solutions.

I use a table of about 4000 FirstName-NickName pairs to find likely equivalents.  Is...

Both methods will perform in a second, even for millions of rows.

Normalization allows a system to properly handle one-to-many relationship requirements so I don't quite understand your question.  You can model this as a single flattened table...which mainframers did when using...

Maybe you want to do something similar to this script.  I use it to log all parameters passed into a procedure for a short time to see how customers are...