The promise of BI and data anlysis tools is not to show you where you already are. Rather, it's to help you discover things that you may not know, and...

I'm not certain,...

I don't think I would...

Yup, code page 1252 is the ANSI code page so it all makes more sense now!

Can you attach a sample file, maybe a test file that exhibits the behavior but doesn't do anything important?

If it *is* an encoding problem and you can determine what encoding...

I'm not sure what the problem is, but this works fine for me so I don't think the problem is the accents...

declare @table table ( x varchar(255) )

declare @my_value varchar(100)

set...

You're not specifying the owner/schema for the stored procedure and/or the table you're inserting into? You're trying to insert NULL values into columns that don't allow NULLs? The moon isn't...

Caveat: I'm not a security expert, so be careful with this...

It's not clear from your response if you are actually doing what folks are suggesting, so just to make sure,...

In this competative world, the interviewer will pick the person who writes the best code in a reasonable amount of time and, be sure about this, it doesn't take someone...

e.g. (assuming child table does not have identity, if it does then SET IDENTITY_INSERT there)

SET IDENTITY_INSERT tblMaster ON

INSERT INTO prod.tblMaster SELECT * FROM tblMaster

SET IDENTITY_INSERT tblMaster OFF

INSERT INTO prod.tblChild SELECT...

Is there any reason that SET IDENTITY_INSERT could not be used here? If it's in the same database (or server, I guess) then if an identity column is the problem,...

I know, I got the question right. Just being snarky. 😛

Where was the choice for "Could not locate entry in sysdatabases for database 'Northwind'."?

Microsoft software sort-of already does try to link errors to solutions. When an error occurs, look at the Event Viewer. An error or other message (assuming one appears, that is)...

What platform is your app targeted to? Is it Windows? Windows has a rich (if somewhat convoluted) API for dealing with time, and Windows knows about time zones. If you're...