After reading the article and feedback to-date, in my mind the situation presented boiled down to this: from the programmer's perspective, you are storing one fact in one of two...

Son of a gun, that's it. Thanks! The self-referential constraint has to be checked, and the parent column (as stored in the table) is not indexed. Index that column and...

A lot depends on what you want to do. If you just want to work over the data, there are a number of utilities and routines that will convert "native"...

I'd like to add to all the above threads.

I tend to use two characters for table aliases; this generally works, because some tables pop up in almost every query, and...

Where I work, we came up with almost the exact same methodology as Ferguson, with one minor extra tweak. (I have no DTS programming skills, so please pardon me if...

To toss a few more cents in and to emphasize a point of Frank's, I would recommend not including formatting characters in the telephone string.

In the US the stadard convention...

We do pretty much the same thing here as well, with a few modifications.

First off, we just automatically cycle the error log once a week (Sunday at midnight--with our setup...

One thing I always try to do is add a comment at the start of a "programming block" -- BEGIN, IF, ELSE, WHILE. It really helps when reviewing code...

Oops, forgot to add to the assumption the fact that you create an index on the datetime created column. (Sounds like that's the primary key, anyway.)

Philip

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Assuming you have the "datetime inserted" for each row, why not do one of these:

A) Stored procedure, pass in the data to be loaded, but before inserting do a