What exactly does N'string' do? Is it really necessary?

I liked the idea of developing and testing with your own "schema" before cutting across to a dbo implementation.

It is not a facility that I commonly use and I don't...

Reading through my old MS notes from SQL 6.5 days it appears that running UPDATE STATISTICS on a table will recreate all distribution statistics within an index. Moving forward...

Lee,

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not every DBA -- not even every Oracle DBA -- is so arrogant.

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It...

I've used Notes. It is more of a document management system that an RDBMS.

If you are storing documents then, obviously Notes is the way to go. ...

Age old problem, age old solution.

There is never time to do it right but there is always time to do it over!

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Not happy with Sybase? Curiosity impels me to ask, why not?

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It's more of a...

Looking through the Wrox Press Book "Beginning PHP4 Databases" the comments that it makes on MySQL and PostGres are

MySQL

• Optimised for Reads only apps.
• Doesn't support DRI.
• Doesn't support views or stored...

Thanks for this.

I notice that the _WA_SYS stats count towards the 255 indices allowed on a table.

There is an db option to autocreate these stats which defaults to "ON" as...

I've seen the military approach.

I've heard a story about NASA spending millions to develop a pen that would write in space. The Russians provided their cosmonauts with pencils.

The military...

Are you the system administrator?

Get the system administrator to create a copy of that user explicitly for testing.

As I said, this is a long winded approach. Use EM to...

I think alot depends on the size of your organisation and the culture.

In a small to medium organisation it is possible to get to know most of the developers. ...

If you are using Windows Authentication then you have to log in as that user.

If you are using SQL Authentication then Open SQL Query Analyser and connect to your database...

Don't forget the licensing issues!

If your database is serving and internet/extranet/intranet then you will be using per processor licensing hence doubling your costs.

What about single point of failure principles? ...

I simply don't trust back-ups.

The only problem I have with differential back-ups is what happens if one of your backups corrupts?

OK, I know that 99 out of 100 times this...