I wrote something in SQL to compare stored procedures (or any two sequences, really): http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/T-SQL/66074/[/url]. It's free, and it shows off some CTE features of 2005.

The difference between varchar and nvarchar is not to do with trailing spaces. One's unicode, one's not. SQL will do implicit conversions as necessary, but if the column is varchar...

Depending on your method of import, Excel usually comes in as nvarchar rather than varchar. If that's the case, then you will need to search using the RTRIM() function:

SELECT...

There's only one problem with the calculation of the median: if the row count of the sample data is even, then the median is not unique (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median). Here's a...

Flo, using your function, when I test:

PRINT dbo.ufn_CompareBH('Jesse', 'Jessie')

I get zero returned, but I think it should be 1, right?

Bob, as far as performance is concerned, I think you're going...

UltraEdit is a great product, I used to use it extensively in the past. I don't think it had the 'compare files' feature back then.

This effort to compare stored procedures...

Doug, thanks for the responses. I updated the code by adding the 'TRUE' parameter to the sp_spaceused call (and gave you credit for that - I submitted the updated version...

Derek Dongray (2/13/2009)

---

Regarding your problem of stored procedure comparison, Windiff is still available (just Google "windiff download", one of the places is Microsoft) so I'd have just used that (and...

This problem originally came to mind when I started work on a tool for comparing the text from stored procedures (http://jessesql.blogspot.com/2009/02/comparing-stored-procedures-part-1.html). I wanted to allow the option of omitting all...

Here are a couple of articles related to this thread:

"Worst Practice - Bad Comments", By Andy Warren, 2003/01/23:

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/worstpracticebadcomments/893/

"The case against using single-line comments", By Cade Bryant, 2003/01/22:

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/30672/

Irish Flyer (2/11/2009)

---

Given the inconsistancies noted, I guess it brings home the point that one should be consistant in coding. Either use the -- convention to comment a line,...

I'm glad that everyone seemed to like the question (and surprising answer); I wondered whether people would object to the obscure nature of the problem.

This scenario came up when I...

Great article, I really like your approach. Working in ETL, I too often have to look at unfamiliar data, with guidance that is missing or unreliable, and it's great having...

It's Excel data that comes in formatted as text (even though all incoming data is numeric), and is converted from unicode to double-precision. What's odd is that some rows work...

Great article! I have one more quarter-turn of the screw to add to locking down the database. When the stored proc that handles the login checks the database, instead of...