Well, Steve's editorial has certainly stirred up a debate, and in our particular ( and peculiar) case I feel not much closer to a solution. Having attended a couple of...

Eric M Russell (3/3/2015)

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It sounds to me like some folks are just making in-place modifications to tables and stored procedures in the development environment and then using a schema compare...

Peter - Thanks for that. I'll have a good read through. This is not turning out to be a straight-forward as...

We are trying to work out how to move from a "working direct on our single production platform" to "working on a dev/test platform and then deploy to production" setup....

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The statement could have given the result like (count of all the distinct rows) :unsure:

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So, just for fun - how would you do that if you can't use * to...

Thanks Hugo for a perfectly clear explanation!:-)

Hmm. Not sure about this. I tried select distinct * from mytable, and it returned all the rows, which was correct. So you can use * with distinct, just not...

Thanks, Uwe. I think this is something I'll need to play with some time. We have tried splitting tables before, but suffered from poor performance when querying a union. It...

Great question! Like the previous poster, I also have the potential to use this scenario, as we are keeping way too many records in our "live" tables, but nobody wants...

Anju, there are a number of ways of wording any question - but it rather depends what aspect of our knowledge you were intending to test.

By including options that...

I agree with peter.row - the question was badly worded. Seems an ongoing trend...

We're still on 2008 R2 so I've never used THROW. But I was aware that it was a new (ish) feature, so my reasoning was - well, why wouldn't it...

As with others, costs and licensing. Mostly costs, when the only 'benefits' over our current working system are things that would be great to play with technically, but which we...

Ah well, mark it up as one of SQL-Life's many mysteries, I suppose!

Thanks, all, for the discussion. Time to move on.

Cadavre - I fully accept that in the case of the JOIN you illustrate, that the SELECT will locate the columns from the join product OK. But a JOIN explicitly...