You've done a good job of normalization, but I think there are some tweaks that could be made here.

Why is 'CreditCardName' in the main Payment table? It seems to...

To answer the composite index question...

Essentially, if you have a simple index and a composite index, they just sit next to each other, and are maintained separately. The good...

Note that, in both of the above examples, April 2005 and April 2006 will be counted as the same thing. It's best to also add a DATEPART(y,monthdate) to your...

Personally, I think the problem is a tendency among many developers (myself included, when I was young and foolish) to see fewer tables as more efficient. There's no reason...

Ah. See, when I was working out the hash in Excel, 0 was represented by the first digit to the right of the decimal point (the tenths place). ...

Using the hash as a computed column is very nice. That should refine your result set pretty nicely.

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I'm not sure what the point of the magnitude column is. ...

xposted

Is the problem that the function doesn't return anything? Or that it always returns 1?

Even stax68's suggestion would only point to an area in which the function is possibly...

Glad I could help!

Well, I can tell you very rapidly if any two numbers have a pair of digits transposed. The difference will always be divisible by 9. (Old accounting trick,...

Er, because you're asking for three records?

Seriously, I think you're misunderstanding the nature of UNION. UNION is supposed to take multiple datasets with identical structures, and append them vertically.

What...

One of the advantages of HTML is that, ultimately, it's just text.

If it's going to be less than 8000 characters, store it in a varchar field.

If it's going to extend...

First of all, why are you repeating your join criteria? The ON criteria is doing exactly the same job as the WHERE criteria inside your subquery.

However, you want to...

First of all, this is a trivial problem in Crystal Reports, or most any other reporting application. Depending on the method you are using to display this information, you...

Excellent book recommendation.

The similar horror story I remember hearing was a developer coming to a DBA, because the users were bitching about how slow the data entry was. The...