Thank you.  An interesting article indeed.

Thanks everyone.  As I said in my original post, instinctively I felt that this was a "no-brainer" but I'm now content to proceed with the current model (not that I...

The heuristic is that if the Status = Approved AND Date < Today then it is accepted as Taken.

I apologise if I didn't make myself clear:  I'm not suggesting an...

The columns were permitted to be null for good business reasons.  I know that there are two (or possibly more) schools of thought about using null as a meaningful value,...

What the other Ed said.

Edward

Thank you Ken - that works a treat!

Thank you Jeff and Scott for your excellent posts.  Every day is a school day, even for a soon-to-be-66 year-old programmer who, it appears, only dabbles in SQL (my main...

Thanks Thom.  I disagree about aliasing because I don't see the point except when a table is JOINed more than once in the same statement.  The reason I raised the...

The formatting of the answers makes them look more or less identical, so it was a guess as to which of the seemingly identical options was correct.

I worked at a software house where the rules were quite strict on triggers - they were not to be used.  So when we were getting glitches and couldn't work...

Can anyone imagine a scenario where such a catastrophic design decision was actually necessary?

It only checks on column. If table does not exist statement will fail. So in fact old-style if checking on information_schema.columns would be more bulletproof as you can search...

Maybe I've misunderstood but wouldn't it be prudent to check that the table exists before attempting to alter a column?

The SUM would be of StaffLeaveRequest.TimeRequested where the status was either APPROVED or PENDING.  I omitted some of the nuance for clarity.

The correct answer should be "Create Certificate". There is no LOAD CERTIFICATE Command.

I came here to say that.