I think Aaron will have it right. Our IS has a similar table called "subjects", which contains only internal ID and a few more columns that are common to almost...

From BOL :

"SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL READ UNCOMMITTED

This option has the same effect as setting NOLOCK on all tables in all SELECT statements in a transaction"

The main difference is,...

Oh, one more thing... are you sure you need to store the aliases physically in a table? Maybe it could be accomplished without it, just implementing various ways of searching...

Well, I'd say that a lot depends on how you use the table, and who is (or will be) searching it. Is it a part of some utility that will...

Hi Craig,

since the datetime format is stored as number of time elements elapsed from a certain date, and defined as two 4-byte integers, there is no way to "remove" the...

When we had RAID 5 on the drive with production DB data file, it caused serious performance problems - sometimes the application using the database ran so slow that it was impossible...

In fact, Yoda's suggestion not to display the invoice number, before the invoice is saved and to hide the entire process from the eye of the tiger... eh... user... is...

Hmmm... every invoice should have at least 2 numbers - internal ID (assigned using Identity column) and the actual number of invoice (the one that is printed, and sometimes used...

Hi Jeff,

if the 'empty' in fact means NULL and only NULL, then you could use COALESCE or ISNULL function. If empty string is possible - which probably is, then CASE should solve...

Maybe I'm the one who didn't understand the question correctly, but it seems to me that all the replies are trying to answer a different question. I understood it to...

I agree with Chiefley that it is a political problem... did you try to explain them, that using outside tools like Access and Excel can create serious problems? They should understand, that...

Hi,

I'm not quite sure what's your main concern - size of the Data file, or size of the backup?

If you suspect, that the database will grow to the previous size...

I did something similar some time ago - deleting 10M of rows from a table with 20+M rows - in a production database, during normal operation and with log backups every 15...

Hello Dinesh,

there is only one regular thing I could observe in your sample. The city is either last entry, or the rest is separated by a comma... while there are...

Hi Bob,

I agree absolutely, and in fact I already used almost the same SQL in my second post :-). I just didn't have enough time when I was writing the first one, so...