In longer procs/scripts I'll add "section breaks", sort of very high-level pseudo-code, to help me quickly identify what a section of code does (or is meant to do). I...

Whoops. Reminder to self: test all code, especially before posting.

If the record does not exist it won't return an empty string '', but rather null. You therefore need to test for whether a null is returned. The...

The statement "I found it on another blog as a solution to the problem" worries we. Just because someone says something, especially on the internet, doesn't mean it's correct. ...

I've had false positives (or is it negatives?) from CHECKDB when I've run it in parallel with user activity, so I'd strongly recommend running it out-of-hours. Out-of-hours will also...

A 1117 error is an IO_Device error (http://support.tabs3.com/main/R10307.htm is where I go for my OS error codes).

The error message is referring to this being a Write error, so I'd be...

Sorry Hugo, but I have to add my voice to the nay-sayers.

For the first part of the question your answer is based on the fact that by default SQL Server...

Why not use the same tables every time but truncate them before each cycle?

That is the correct behaviour.

When looking at permissions for a login or role through SSMS you only see what has been explicitly assigned to it, not what implicit rights it...

What I think you're seeing here is something very similar to when checking dates.

When doing a date range, something like '1-Apr-2010" is interpreted as '1-Apr-2010 12:00:00am'. This means that...

Just thought I'd throw in my two bob's worth.

I've only ever worked as a permanent employee and I've changed companies (not jobs/roles) very infrequently (3 companies in 25 years).

At one...

There's two different levels of rights involved, one within SQL Server and the other at the Windows level.

The Owner of a job is the account under which the job is...

One thing I forgot to mention.

If tempdb is growing to be much larger than the defaults then it is recommended that the defaults be changed so that it is built...

The Database Properties page is showing the default size for tempdb. This is the size the files will be created as when tempdb is created after the SQL Server...

The SQL Server Agent service is essentially a scheduler (that's a gross simplification, but in the context of the question it's easiest to think of it that way.

All interactions with...