For the record: You can't connect to a database server without connecting to a database.  When you closed SSMS then opened it again, you connected to database set up as...

Tracked down the most obvious quote from BOL:

Copied from the page on WHERE clause Search Conditions http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-US/library/ms173545.aspx

That's the whole problem with three-part logic, it adds a third option to the usual true/false pair.  ANSI SQL defines Unknown to handle the case where you're evaluating against rows...

Could we have the question expanded to include a comment that ANSI_NULLS is set to ON?  Because if a user ran that with ANSI_NULLS OFF, the WHERE clause would evaluate...

What about replication?  If your function is being used by articles in one or more publications, then any drop or alter statements could be blocked until replication stops using the...

Hm, doesn't seem to be a reason for that... Have you looked at sys.sysprocesses?  You can check there to see what your spid is blocking.  Also, it will tell you...

You might find it useful to store information in a Master database if it should persist beyond restores.  For example, a list of databases located on linked servers.  If you...

mkeast's suggestion is probably the best so far for avoiding conflicts.  However, since we're all having fun suggesting varied solutions, here's my two cents:

Roll the two source tables together into...

Sorry, I guess I was a bit cryptic.  I know the sortkey was the identity column - I used that technique for numbering results, until 2005 came out with the rownumber()...

What about simply using a Regex function?  As discussed here on MSDN,

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/07/02/SQLRegex/default.aspx

you can create a CLR function that just passes along the parameters to the .NET regex methods.  Save...

Two questions really,

When you "moved to a new server", did you move the database, or change the account used to connect to the database?  Because SQL Server also stores a...

Creating a sortkey is probably the best solution, but I imagine it would run faster as a union, rather than inserting into a temp table:

select Account, Amount, Code

from (select 1...

You're right, it's probably the WITH options. SQL Server 2005 syntax is to use brackets around the list of WITH options, while 2000 simply lists them directly. For...

Actually, if you have more than one index on a large table, you'll get back duplicate results.

eg: The results from one of our databases

name ...

What about just writing a wrapper stored proc that calls xp_cmdshell, using the EXECUTE AS clause to run that proc under an account that has appropriate permissions?

Looking through BOL, I...