I guessed wrongly that because it makes no sense to do a backup within a transactiobn, then the transaction would be ignored and it would work.

I'm not sure what the...

Hugo Kornelis (9/12/2010)

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On SQL Server 2005, the output of sp_help indicates that the column is typed as numeric(8,6), not numeric(38,6). I cannot check this on SQL Server 2008, as I...

Well I never!

Interesting/worrying! We have lots of code that does something like

declare @i int

set @i = 10

set rowcount @i

insert into tab1

select * from tab2

in order to insert the top n rows from...

Nope, still works in 2008 (luckily, or our code would break!)

Floats can be useful when the same column needs to be able to hold either large values (lots of numbers before the decimal point) or very small values (lots of...

Which version...

Interesting.

Can anyone explain exactly what the 3rd argument of Round() is for?

The BOL says

"function Is the type of operation to perform. function must be tinyint, smallint, or int. When function...

Good point.

I'll bookmark this page in readiness for 2100 🙂

Hugo Kornelis (8/12/2010)

Based on visual inspection of the code, you appear to be right about the missing GROUP BY. I'm glad I overlooked that when answering! Luckily, there is no...

I've had a play with this on my development server, and the results seem a little curious. Apparently, I've used each of the collations Macedonian, Lithuanian_Classic, Korean_Wansung_Unicode, Hindi, Azeri_Latin_90, and...

Well spotted - I was wondering why the 'correct' view does not exist in...

A bit of a strange question.

I'd never come across the user of parantheses with DISTINCT so assumed it must be some sort of extended syntax I didn't know about. So...

I hate "me too" replies, but I also failed on the "Will definitely use more resources" option, because it is just not true. Consider the alternative of a standard column...

A lesson that's common to many QotDs is that you should never rely on default values - always be specific, so you know exactly what you're getting, and so does...