An excellent article, a logical approach and elegant examples. Personally I found his English, although grammatically incorrect,  was understandable and has a certain charm.

David

I also disagree with Steve. In the UK, with the election imminent, immigration is a hot topic. The EU is expanding all the time and has an open borders policy....

Hello Chris

Please excuse a question from a newbie, but is there an advantage in using the between operator as opposed to using >= and <= comparisons. 

Looking at the execution plans...

This data does not seem normalised. Are you keeping it this way for ease of reporting ?

Why not create a separate table with an IDENTITY column and all the distinct...

You could use SQL Profiler to record all the SQLBatch activity on your database. If you use the TSQL SQLBatch : Completed event and the Stored Proc RPC : Completed...

I didn't realise this, but if you concatenate strings to give a valid numeric value SQL Server converts them to a numeric and the isnumeric() function returns TRUE.

So  if you...

Great article thanks.

Off to rewrite all my CASE statements using COALESCE()

David

Huh,

all I got when I tried this out afterwards was

Server: Msg 170, Level 15, State 1, Line 1

Line 1: Incorrect syntax near 't2'.

Is this a SQL Server 2005 operator ?

Hi, I had problems restoring an archive database from a SQL Server 7.0 server to a SQL Server 2000 server. Although you could specify the logical filenames and the restore as...

I use temporary tables to store large results sets for reporting, usually where the values required cannot be calculated in a single SELECT statement. The reporting runs in a third...