2 integer fields vs 1 integer field.  I know a DBA without a job who was using GUID's on each record!  Sorry without identifying the fields it is not clear. ...

Joe, thanks for printing the rant, I see where you are comming from.  I don't want to get into a debate, about the purity of compuer generated id fields vs...

Journeyman, perhaps you could shed light on the Identity column issue, or tell me where to find your "rants".

We have tables that need 3 or four fields to define...

Thanks a lot!  All is well now.

I used scope_identity once and it diddnt work.  I was sending 100's of sql statements up to the server using ADO from VB like this (forgive the pseudo code):

dim SQL...

In 7 years, this never deadlocked and it always retrieves a unique next number.  This is just an exerpt of a function, but it finds a unique @iBatch (integer batch...

In some cases adding appropriate indexing can decrease the memory growth.  You might have some queries that are doing a lot more work, generating temporary tables, or doing full table...

I think comparing the time as floats might be a performance optimization

SELECT CAST(GetDate() AS FLOAT) - FLOOR(CAST(GetDate() AS FLOAT))

returns

0.50975181327521568

Try to avoid regular expressions for obvious speed reasons, but when necessary or speed isnt an issue they are great.  Here is a link to a way to use them...