At a place I worked that shall remain nameless, all the integers HAD to be bigint. This was required by the architects. Stupidest thing ever.

In the immortal words of Paris Hilton, "That's hot". I love the technique and the article is very well written.

Thanks Ben, great idea for when you absolutely have to have those fast lookups with wildcards at the beginning of the search term. Which happens more often then one...

Thanks Jeff! I was looking into using Pivot instead of the Case method, and I came to the same end result. If you have multiple columns, the Case statement...

To Modify:

DECLARE @var varchar(8000)

SELECT @var = ISNULL(@var + '/') + FieldName

FROM Table

SELECT @Var

However, this only works for one entity. For muliple entities the CTE recursion works fine, although it...

I like this a lot, it's a good demonstration of what it means to do test driven development. Everyone uses their own techniques, I tend to favor test harnesses...

Oh, you caught me, lol! Although I did read "Three Men in a Boat" years ago, my sig is inspired by Connie Willis' book, which I finally got around...

Thanks RBarry; humor is eternal!

Jeff,

Long time listener, first time caller. 🙂 Actually, I used to post here a bit, but not so much anymore.

Anyway, I've been working with SQL 2008 in a...

Great article, Vincent, though I found the non-date musings WAY, WAY more interesting that the actual information on the date dimension. I'm in a project right now where we...

Interesting, thanks for the tip; I'll have to watch out for that. So it seems to result in a sum(distinct value) instead of sum(value), right?

It does seem like pre-aggregating...

OMG, everybody out of the pool, quick! Read this article, now! Do not write a single piece of SQL code until you've finished it, and understand it.

Top notch...

There are constructive ways to say things and non-constructive ways to say things. Didn't your momma teach you the difference between these?

Thanks for the article! Hierarchy functionality is always tricky, and this just might simplify it. I'll need to play around with it.

I'm wondering if this solves the complexities...

Nice article...very interesting solution! I like the RowNumber with partition functionality, seems useful for a number of things.

My only complaint is that the SQL Code is very difficult to...