Oh wow. I'd have never thought of checking the collation. Thanks for the article and the good reminder. Headed off now to check the collation on my...

Sorry LP -- I just had a nice big explanation with examples, and this damn website took it and tossed it. Now I'm pissed. I can't even go...

LP (5/21/2009)

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Let me explain how we using this methodology without violation of basic principles. We using it for metadata lookup tables and each table has a primary key. There...

Thanks Phil. I looked into that operation, too. The "catch" is that the one table is already in order that matches the "row number" column of the second...

The large tables in this project don't grow, so long as our purging jobs complete in a timely manner. We keep about 500,000 Windows computer inventories in this database....

Despite having shrunk the index from 11,335,830 to 387,849 pages (a reduction of 83.5Gb in 8k pages), I've only been able to sequeeze out a few Gb of disk space...

Thanks. I'll give that a shot now.

Uhhhhh .... I don't have Scripting...

For IP address manipulation, we store them as BIGINTs. We have two UDFs; one that encodes an IP address as a BIGINT and one that converts back. Information...

Ref. the example I gave above ... handles this very nicely. And, if you use VARxxx columns, it's not *overly* wasteful. Still not as small as a BIT...

"Hmmm, let's see; column A547DD tracks the OS while columns A547DE tracks cookies. Piece of cake." I think not.

I can see where you're coming from now ... 'cause it's easier...

Of course the big drawback to this type of data encoding is that you have to completely decode it before you can do anything meaningful with it. This means...

There is one significant (potential) problem with this query. Max(emp_id), max(fname), max(lname) and max(job_lvl) could all be from different rows in the table; they're _probably_ not going to be...

Additionally, we remove the local Administrators group from the SQL Server's Server Administrators role. This keeps our system admins from messing with the SQL server stuff (or snooping!).

Searching for a single argument across 55 columns is going to be ugly, no matter how you do it. Most likely, you're wanting to do use a LIKE '%something-to-look-for%'...