The Will Robie series are definitely a good read.  You mentioned books 1-4, however book 5 was just published the end of 17 (End Game).  I just finished reading it last week...

I ran this script on one of my development servers & all worked fine.

I ran it a second time thinking it shouldn't find any more indexes to rebuild, but it's...

Hi Alex, Here's how I programmatically script out stored procedures, views, and triggers from Sql-2000 so as to back them up on a nightly basis.  I have created an Active-X task...

Now that's what I was looking for.  Thank you very much!

So even doing something like this:

select max(

   isnull(datalength(column1),0)

 + isnull(datalength(column2),0)

 + isnull(datalength(column3),0))

from tablename

may be close but not totally accurate since it omits what is needed for internal storage.  I would suppose varchar columns would also need...

Wouldn't that be the length of the table definition, rather than the largest row of data inside the table?

BTW - when I run this I get the value 23448.

Just as an FYI converting the varchar fields to varbinary also works.

where convert(varbinary(60),MyLastNameField) between convert(varbinary(60),char(0)) and convert(varbinary(60),replicate(char(255),60))

Thank you very much for the fast reply!  This would have taken me a real long time to figure out.

I didn't really think so. Thank you very much for the response.

I need to do this exact something, and have developed it using dynamic sql as mentioned. What I'm wondering is has anyone tried doing this with the in clause...

I found my answer if anybody else is interested. In the Sql-Agent service within control panel, there is a setting for allowing the service to interact with the desktop....