Good article. I've always as a matter of habit scripted drop & create commands because of the potential problems they may cause but, over time, had forgotten exactly why...

SINGLE_USER is a database setting. You can set it by running SQL code as in

alter database [myDatabase] set SINGLE_USER

This means that only one connection can be accessing that database...

Good article. I was getting a bit lost following your examples (committed selects?) but I think the basic ideas were well covered. If people wish to know more...

Great article! Demystifies some of the worries that I've had about replication.

You could have lots of free space in the database files. Think of them like a hard disk partition - you have a 50GB drive C with 20GB of...

I assume you are using ADO. Could you use SQL Profiler to see what the ADO is doing with the SQL Server SET options when it opens...

It sounds like a spreadsheet may work just as well for you with your current structure??

In any case, rather than having columns such as

software1, software2, software3, etc

and worrying about...

Odd requirement - is it something to do with trust accounting?

Anyhow, you will need a global table with an identity column and then link to this from your other tables....

Parameters, Parameters, Parameters.... Stored procs, or at least dynamic code properly using sp_executesql, is the best way to go.

It can also insulate you from changes in the...

I want such a server 😀 That'd be just awesome!!!

The article was correct but a tad short - it seems like the start of a series. I'd say...

Good discussion, only I wish to point out that I think

While @@trancount > 0

rollback

isn't necessary although it certainly doesn't hurt and it's good self-documenting code...

Great article. Good to see some research into this oft-argued topic (particularly the sp_ prefix!).

Following on from a few questions back, I'm still not sure if the answer was...

I suspect you're after syntactic convenience which is why you want a view rather than repeating the same snippet of SQL in several places. Unfortunately, unless you use a...

The post that's close uses "relational division". Perhaps you could extend it a bit using some of the ideas in one of today's articles (http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/T-SQL/62159/)? specifically...

I think the purpose of the stringbuilder was to just get the XML output to visually compare that you can indeed read it. In practice you wouldn't use the...