Yes, this tortured me during a project, constantly having to specify COLLATION DATABASE_DEFAULT. We lost days over this, seriously.

This is a real defect (not bug, as it's intentional) in MSSQL,...

The ` (grave) character makes a very good delimiter. It has no lexical value in any language.

You're a 100% right Steve. Many companies have died the death of a thousand cuts...

The only thing I ever found SSIS good for was reading in spreadsheets. Nothing else really works to do that. Otherwise, I just keep everything in the database.

But that's just...

The problem is that the people who use the tools aren't the ones who buy the tools. People who use tools aren't nearly as important to MS (and to be...

Very nice response to the PostgreSQL article. I've just come off a year+ of MSSQL from 15+ years of Oracle and his points rang very true. However, my main complaint...

Balancing user and technical requirements, therein is the craft. But never forget Liberace's immortal words: without the business, there's no show.

Just wanted to share this trick that I've used with a lot of success over the years:

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SELECT 'In A not B' location,

...

I remember hearing a surgeon talk about his surgical memoir. It really struck me. He said, the first 10 years, you learn how to cut. The next 10 years, you...

If we called "Best Practices" by their true name (The One Practice To Rule Them All) people would be more skeptical...:-P

Everything can always be improved. And I agree, developers need to know how to do both row by row and set operations, and use whichever one optimizes the best for...

"Always do what makes sense"

I'm not so sure about the example given in the article, but that is sound advice. My rule of thumb is, if you need to handle...

Here is my similarly themed article, albeit about a different maligned technique:

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Advanced+Querying/2596/

Bottom line, one always needs to know what to optimize for. More times than many people realize,...

XML started off from SGML as a way to develop authoring languages. For some reason, XML languages are used as databases mostly today. Why that occurred is a long and...

XML isn't a language, it's a meta-language:

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/whatisxml/2473