Just to mention, I started off following the MS dictum to "never use the system tables". I did a lot through the various sp_help... and similar procedures (INSERT...EXECUTE...), but generally...

To the best of my knowledge (which is not absolute), it is not possible (using the "out of the box" installation SQL Server installation utilities) to install SQL Agent on...

I only needed to check over what was in there (for now, at least), and ended up with the following query to list what, where how, and so forth. (I...

When coming up with complex passwords, I think of a set of related songs or tunes that seems appropriate to the setting. (For instance, last job I used "old Saturday Morning...

Ideal. Thanks! (I know I should, but I rarely ever think about--let alone use--the INFORMATION_SCHEMA objects.)

   Philip

An issue I've wondered about (after reading up on the subject a while back): counteroffers. If one of your employees is offered a job elsewhere and is seriously considering it,...

Doh! That's it exactly, you have to use two-part naming to specify the old owner of the object as well as the object--and,...

You appear to have left in the marks used within BOL to indicate how to write commands. Try:

EXEC sp_changeobjectowner 'insert_test_1', 'jttested'

   Philip

Disclaimer: this is all just my personal interpretation, based on my personal understanding of the issues, based on my personally banging my head on SOX issues the past few months.

SOX...

I've hit this and similar issues before, and know I'm likely to tackle it again in the near future, so I did some messy research. Following are the notes I...

On the first attempt, we altered the column size, and on the second we dropped it and then recreated it. However, these were just commands, instructions issued to the database...

<important disclaimer> As I understand it </important disclaimer> SOX is about unauthorized access or meddling with financial data, or data upon which a companie's finances are based. As this data is...

But why not? What does the engine actually do to/with all the data pages when a column is dropped? What does it do when a column is added?

   Philip

I saw this happen once--a new box was built, the collation order was off just as you said, and when the old databases were moved to the new box a...

I once wrote an application (in Visual Foxpro) to do this. It first uses sp_help to list all the objects in the target database, though queries directly against SysObjects would...