The "Stairway" series here are very good. Always worth a read regardless of experience/knowledge. Here are two examples:

https://www.sqlservercentral.com/steps/stairway-to-data-level-1-the-basics

https://www.sqlservercentral.com/stairways/stairway-to-database-design

<rant>What's so unforgivable, as a UK tax payer, is that this has cost in the region of £12Billion.

(I can forgive the users, and the [probably] very small team of actual...

• This reply was modified 4 years, 1 month ago by  david.edwards 76768. Reason: Adding missed punctuation, through ranty typing :)

As you see in the PowerPoint presentation in the attached ZIP file, I used to be the same way until I went to work for a company that used...

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I also have been known to use xp_CmdShell to work some serious magic for things like file prep (especially on CSVs), file handling (find it, use it, move it...

Many thanks for taking the time to wade through that lot Jeff, and I hope your blood pressure didn't rise too much...

Ok, here is DDL from the "persons" table and all six triggers on it. The other tables for incidents, computers, assets etc follow a similar format.

I have also included DDL...

Thanks for the interest in this. If I am slow responding, it's not because I have lost interest! I am just checking on this one that I am not infringing...

Thanks Jeff. Thorough as always! I cited that thread because it's one of the most comprehensive things I've come across on rebuilding/reorganising in various scenarios, so I stuck it in...

Be careful of autogrowth here. Also, it's a good idea on any drive with auto-growth enabled, create an file called 'deletemeinemergencies' or similar. Make it big enough, say 20...

I was seriously considering setting up a consultancy yesterday and offering my services to HM Gov at a fixed fee of £20m to set up a process...

It's the fact that the spent £12 billion of tax payers money on that spreadsheet that really annoys me. Glad to...

Wow! that takes their their shonky datatyping and design to a whole new level!...

Is this the same table that has the weird DateTime column and time as INT column in your recent post?

Does this third-party database allow creation of Indexed Views?

If so, might...

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Also, just to be sure, the OP stated that they weren't the ones that are responsible for the poor datatyping that you're correctly talking about.  A 3rd party is...

We do the same as others have mentioned. Load into a table where the columns are wide nvarchar and then validate afterwards. We use TRY_CAST and TRY_PARSE to check...