What are you trying to achieve? Surely this is going to give billions of rows in the result. Each row in Eng_Wales is going to join with every...

There also appears to be a space missing before AS in line 5.

In this scenario, the GUID is not unique in the table so I would expect exactly the same result if you were using an integer or anything else as the...

I would recommend strongly that nobody has direct access to these tables. If all access is through stored procedures, you have full security control and can implement whatever logging...

Why expose them to users - ever. I wouldnt inflict them on my worst enemy !!!! 🙂

Note that even .NET uses binary internally - not everything is XML.

I agree wholeheartedly with the article. The systems at each end still need to know the schema so...

I take your point but surely this is the very last line of defence. All keys should be internal to the app / db and invisible to the user...

There always is the risk that GUIDs are only unique if the network cards generating them have unique ids. They're supposed to but not if they're clones!

The scenario of...

... or, more generally, add half the last increment before rounding. eg, if you want to round up to one decimal place, use ROUND(number + 0.05, 1). Subtracc...

That big a discrepancy and that way around, I immediately would think of lack of physical memory or, perhaps, an anti-virus or other process on the desktop interfering.

The simple answr is no - but you could write it to a temporary table which the sp then could see.

I agree with the in-database approach - neater and more robust ... but put the images in a dedicated table with just id and, assuming its big, put it in...

Is the 'beefed up' server multi-cpu and the workstation single? Could be a problem if you are getting a parallel execution plan on the 'beefed up' server.

Agreed. ... and there may be a good reason for doing this - I was curious as to what it was. If there isn't a need for it,...

Why bother - its only a key and any manipulation will slow things down. Why not keep it numeric then, if you need to display it, convert it to...