Actually, it returns 54.0 (return type is the same as the type of the argument).

I do not agree completely on the language issue. That might apply to native English-speakers, but my native languages are Dutch and French.

Being an IT-er, I usually carry out search...

As a DBA, system administrator..., you unavoidably have access to sensitive information. I have never seen an arrangement where you can effectively carry out such a job if your access...

Easiest way to remember this: OUTPUT clause is valid for those statements that produce a "Deleted" and/or "Inserted" table.

Powershell is a nice language, but hey - why would you bother investing effort in a Windows-only language, whereas javascript, perl or python is just as powerful and may be...

Connect to <localcomputername>\SQLEXPRESS

So you have a one-to-many relation between users and albums, a one-to-many relation between albums and images, and a one-to-many relation between images and comments.

A pure normalized database design is:

...

You have inner join, left join and full outer join anyway. A right join is a small addition that makes the set of possibilities symmetrical and easy to remember.

Furthermore, if more...

Given your boundary conditions (no indexes...), a full table scan is unavoidable.

Anyway, you should not use the "UNION" approach; this will cause TWO tablescans instead of one. And I would...

Use the ANSI standard EXCEPT operator, which gives you the difference between two sets. It also exists in SQL Server 2005, and in Oracle, it is called "MINUS".

I think you should first of all choose a career that you like and that interests you. After all, you will be doing it for a large part of your...

The answers of the SQL gurus are more clear and efficient, but note that you can always construct a composite column value by string concatenation:

SELECT CAST(DATEPART(day,SNDF.DateTimeSampled) AS CHAR(2))

+ '/'...

The article on Common Table Expressions in Books Online is quite clear. Some guidelines: for a recursive CTE, you have to pay attention to 3 things:

1. You need an anchor member inside the...

I know of no commercial DB that gives you an unlimited number of columns: Oracle tops off at 1000, MySql can get over 3000, depending on the underlying database engine...

The...

Actually, I have already done this in Oracle. The trick consists of "reducing" the names that you are looking for to a value that is the same for all...