This expression is independent of any language and datefirst settings:

-- gives 1 for monday..., 7 for sunday

datepart( weekday, @datetime + @@datefirst - 1 )

Transaction log backup can be seen as equivalent of incremental backup, because to restore you need last full backup and all the increments (transaction log backups) until the point-in-time desired...

The same problem I solved with a trigger. It works fast even with multi-row updates and inserts, because it checks overlapping only of id's that are "touched" (using INSERTED table...

I also had the same problem in my everyday work, having 10 000+ procedures per database. You can imagine how log it takes to find the right one in the...

As Paul said, check for indexes. Especially for two-column index on Table1( ClientID, Timestamp) or (Timestamp, ClientID) - test for both cases and measure logical reads. Experiment with cluster index...

It's very difficult because there is almost no documentation on that. Documentation for MS Visual studio plugins has some mutual interfaces that can help. There are also some rare articles...

You condense group of rows to one row. You can get max, min, avg, count(*) etc.

List of all aggregate functions is in t-sql reference:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms173454.aspx

You can use distinct only...

Maybe this ?

SET NUMERIC_ROUNDABORT ON

INNER and OUTER keywords are optional, and personally, I ommit them in my code.

"JOIN" means "INNER JOIN". If there is LEFT, RIGHT or FULL keywords, it is outer join -...

I would move begin tran just after begin try, and commit tran just before end try.

That's because not all transactions can be commited.

If commit raises error and it is WITHIN...

select s.StudentID, s.Name, s.Section,

DifferentRecords =

CASE WHEN MAX(s.Percentage)<>MIN(s.Percentage)

OR MAX(s.SubjectID)<>MIN(s.SubjectID)

OR MAX(s.OtherActivities)<>MIN(s.OtherActivities)

THEN 'yes'

ELSE 'No'

END

from dbo.students s

group by s.StudentID, s.Name, s.Section

DECLARE @StartMonth DATETIME = '20100201'

SELECT NewMonth = DATEADD( month, cnt.number, @StartMonth )

FROM master.dbo.spt_values cnt

WHERE cnt.type='P' AND cnt.number <= 9

SQL Server does a very strange stuff with precision of the result when doing basic math operations (*, /). I did a research and to put it short, use DECIMAL(25,13)...

You can declare a #temp table and insert id's there before the update/del,

or use this syntax for upd/del:

UPDATE a SET a.column1 = 'somevalue'

FROM table1 a

JOIN table2 b on a.id =...

Is it coded in the driver or application, i don't know, but it is a very bad practice to "discover" parameters of a known stored procedure. (or it is a...