select ...

union

select ...

union

select ...

union

select ...

This is a ridiculous construct! If you are certain you do want to use union because you want to sort and deduplicate the rows, then you...

Having worked in IT since 1971, I've give this matter quite some thought. I suppose now I have different perspectives on what is important in life, especially since having had...

Being undecided is good. At least I think so....I'm giving all candidates another week to do/say something that I can believe in.

In many cases, yes. But in this case?

Your economy...

The election in the US is next week and I'm not sure who to vote for.

Well, I find that a pretty scary statement, especially from someone who is as articulate...

I know this is a very trivial point, but you do this so often that it's really setting my teeth on edge !

"Since it's release" should be "Since its...

Not only is the substance of this article excellent, but I also find the style most attractive. It's well-written, extremely useful and also quite amusing. What more could one ask...

I'm not aware of that possibility. You can remove the schema.ini file, but the sequence of the columns becomes arbitrary, to say the least! And doing that may introduce other...

1) Create your text folder on the server, e.g. D:\Mssql\LinkedServer

2) Populate your text folder. For a simple example, I'm going to use the following tab-delimited file, called Example.txt

MyCol1(TAB)MyCol2(TAB)MyCol3

12138(TAB)129(TAB)Row 1 description

12138(TAB)129(TAB)Row...

I prefer to use a linked server using the Jet 4.0 text driver. This technique allows me to treat the incoming text file as a table, so I can join...

I think this has in recent times become an easy question to answer: Access projects (adps) appear to be going nowhere. AFAIK, they're unable to connect to SQL Server 2005...

Interesting point - having thought about it briefly, I don't look as stored procedures in the same way as a piece of VB code. The reasons are probably many and...

I'd have thought most money and datetime values are not relevant to lookup tables. All my lookup codes are int (or some variation thereof), char or varchar, or yes/no. Data...

The education database contains around 65,000 rows for each of 14 years. The users need the ability to compare, say, quartiles for several years by school type, and/or electorate, etc.

"or simply download the data to Excel for any statistical stuff I do". Be very careful. First off, Excel can't handle more than 64,000 rows, so in many cases is...

I was over-simplifying when I wrote "deriving median values" . I have written a stored procedure which does any of the following, depending on the parameters passed: Medians, Quartiles, Quintiles,...