Personally, If you have to ask for questions to ask then you really need to sit down and think what are you hiring this person to do and build your...

Well, currently I am the working DBA for the system, and all my knowledge sort of 'accreted' to me on an as-needed basis, from web sites, BOL, and trial and...

Good point.  We are looking for both, of course.  Management specs are for a Production DBA with Development skills, especially in...

When returning variables from dynamic SQL, it is easier and cleaner to use the sp_executeSQL stored proc. 

Declare @mySQL nvarchar(500)

Declare @myParms nvarchar(100)

Declare @var1 int, @var2 int

SET @mySQL = N'SELECT 

Interesting. It would be simple enough to implement with a constraint + a trigger, but the trigger would be enough, so the constraint is not needed.

Considering what a constraint's...

A lot of debate, and good debate (IMO) where it comes to this question. Looking it over, I see that I made some assumptions about this table as well....

Stored procedures are "precompiled". From BoL:

[Stored Procedures] allow faster execution.

If the operation requires a large amount of Transact-SQL code or is performed repetitively, stored procedures can be faster...

So, basically you need to update if (a) it is new, or (b) it is changed since last week, yes?

First, we need to get some code to identify the last...

Absolutely. This is because, no matter how much it seems that it should work, each of the calls to the server is a separate process. To return the...

Which step is it that takes more time? Or is it that all steps take more time?

THe techniques used here depend on what exactly you need to do.

For example, if what you needed to do was to update the SalesRep on your customers (because one rep...