When testing dynamic SQL, I've found that replacing the EXEC with a PRINT statement usually makes the problem obvious. In fact, I almost always have two lines, one with EXEC @varname...

It seems like you are comparing apples and oranges. To see if the problem is with the variable, change your constant to have the exact same value as the variable...

I have a feeling you're just seeing the results of caching. Try switching the order you run them in and see what happens. If it's not a caching issue, please give...

It's due to the brackets "[]".

Like sees the brackets as surrounding a pattern, and therefore actually is ignoring them in the comparison. In your string returned from the table, the...

Unless I'm missing something, everything about the dupe rows is duped except for the column that you want summed. If that's the case, why not just SELECT INTO a new table,...

The N denotes that that string is Unicode. Think of nvarchar versus varchar.

I don't remember the reasoning, but I'm pretty sure that "::" precedes system UDFs, i.e. built-in ones.

The procedure that executes for this report is currently processing a "conditional", such as "IF" or "WHILE". If it's hanging, I'm guessing that the expression tested with IF or WHILE...

Sorry about the simulpost, rsharma. It wasn't there when I previewed, but was when I posted.

If each location is limited to 1 client, you could put your Primary location identifier into the location table instead of the client table.

The only thing I can think of is if the .dll for xp_fixeddrives uses 40 bit integers for some reason. If unsigned, that would make the largest value 1,099,511,627,775. If...

If memory serves, there are some things that even get by the quite good IsReallyNumeric function. I believe it was numbers with multiple decimal places in them, such as 12.56.12.

I...

Unless I'm having a brain fart, it seems like the only way records would be returned under your proposed criteria is if both the start and end date were today,...

You'll need to use the extended properties, and yes, it is like creating your own "description" column, but that's what you're doing when you add a description through the GUI,...

You could point them to BOL, which explicitly states this. Check out the MODIFY FILE description section under the ALTER DATABASE help screen, and you'll at least have evidence that...

I probably didn't describe that clearly enough. It's not the number of databases being altered per batch that's the problem. It's the number of changes per database that is the...