One advantage that I had as my last permanent job shifted from 20% at home to 95% at home was that my teammates were all in another state. They literally...

duh...

Don't check "Discard Results" in the Results tab, even accidentally !

In the words of Emily Latilla: "Never Mind." 🙂

Transact-SQL does not allow constructions like those.

The closest you can come would be to build the entire query as a string, then execute the string using exec()...

You cannot back-out of SP4. You would have to re-install SQL Server from scratch, and then apply SP3.

Putting any synchronous process with a component that will run outside of the local SQL Server itself (i.e. pretty much anything like email, linked server tasks, xp_cmdshell calls, etc.) into...

I was the lead DBA in a company that decided that the System Administration department (we DBAs were in the Systems Programming department) would take over responsibility for all changes...

Try adding a harmless line that returns something to the "client" to the end of the stored procedure, such as:

select convert(varchar(5), case @@error when 0 then 'OK' else 'Error' end)...

Use datediff in units of the resolution desired, then integer division and modulo (remainder after integer division, the % operator) in an expression like:

declare @olddatetime datetime

declare @newdatetime datetime

select @newdatetime =...

I don't know about Oracle date ranges, but the difference between '1753-01-01' and '1900-01-01' is between the minimum value for a SQL Server datetime datatype (8 bytes with resolution to...

Use an sql statement with the openquery function, something like:

insert mySQLServer table select ..., convert(datetime, myvarchardate)

from openquery(myOracleServer, 'select ..., munge(cast myOracledate as varchar) as myvarchardate from myOracleTable')

...where munge() is the...

The clustered PK you mention (SubOrganizationID, RecordType, RecordSubType, Date) provides an excellent boost to get, say, all records for a particular SubOrganization. For getting any other large collection of records,...

Updates are potentially expensive operations because the default IS to actually perform a delete followed by an insert. In certain circumstances the server can perform an "update in place", but...

My friend Whiskey Brian slept with a shotgun under his pillow. He shot a bear in his cabin in Alaska, in the dark, twice (or more), with his shotgun. His...

The basic SQL for a db backup is:

BACKUP DATABASE MyDatabaseName TO DISK = 'x:\MyDirectory\MySubDir\MyBackupFileName.BAK'

I'm sure not the expert on this, but I believe you need not install any mapi profiles; you are using smtp instead. It worked in our Exchange environment when supplied...