Just to be clear, you have a table called available_sn which has a serial number and a status flag.

You also have another table called serialNumber which has a serial number,...

The reason why it is 1.0 and not simply 1 is because 1.0 is interpreted as a float by SQL Server.

For example...

select 4/3 - returns...

Not using standard MSSQL tools unfortunately.

However, you might be able to use LogExplorer? I've not used it myself but I'm told it's a very powerful tool for exploring the...

Your state table would have stateID as the pkey. Since I doubt you would be listing the states from it ordered by stateName very often, and would instead be...

Hmm - 500GB database   That'd be scary!

Certainly the backup of a DB of 5-10GB in size doesn't take very long at all.  A...

When you gave the problem description your solution was what was in my head - good to know that I at least thought of a real-world solution!

Good to know!  Thanks for the article

But of course, if you are not using these services (and you probably don't need them if you aren't really aware of what they are) then don't enable the services...

I assume that it's a dBase IV format file and not actually dBase III, V or FoxPro?

Have you tried creating a linked server and using OpenQuery instead of OpenDatasource -...

No need to cross post - continue in other thread..

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/forums/shwmessage.aspx?forumid=23&messageid=345690

A temp table is the best way to go. I presume you are storing the results of the stored proc in a temp table and then using some sort...

what about SET IDENTITY_INSERT?  Sorry about length of this post, but BOL says it pretty well

Description from SQL 2000 Books Online

Allows explicit values...

They don't need Windows administrator privileges to do their work.  If they have sysadmin rights in SQL Server then they can do pretty much anything that the account running SQL...

The NTFS file system comparison is great!

Sometimes you compress by using file/folder attributes because you get seamless access to the file, it's convenient...

By the way, when I say SQL has DATETIME columns, not DATE, SQL Server interprets a given date that has no time as midnight starting on that date. So...