Well I've seen the uglier side of look up tables as well. 

I've seen databases with hundreds of lookup tables, views, stored procedures enough to make your skin crawl.  When...

To be honest, though you were right to grill this person from a technical standpoint in the interview, I believe you crossed the line in your email back to this...

Your problem is the font is not installed on the web server.

This is an excellent post!  I'll tell you why it falls short for me as a developer.

A lot of us work with legacy or code that we inherited.

As...

I'm not sure these articles will help you; however, they may give you some ideas..

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;288366

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;257757

Here's one possible workaround:

Read this article here.

http://www.realworldasp.net/article.asp?article=63

Then you can use xp_cmdshell to shell out to a command prompt and execute

the file with the URL.

Good luck

In many small shops, the database guy and the applications guy are the same person. And he has no training for the database role he has to play. He...

I'd like to point out that Address Type and Company ID are not logical keys here either since this condition could repeat itself.   The idea of using the surrogate key...

Guids, love them.  Nair a problem with them, but I don't let users edit them manually. .

Consider the Phillip Morris issue again.  They could serialize each packet of cigarettes in a...

Not so fast there...

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/tsqlref/ts_xp_aa-sz_6hbg.asp

This example shows how to send a message longer than 7,990 characters. Because message is limited to the length of a varchar (less row overhead, as...

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/vsent7/html/vxconcodingtechniques.asp

All kidding aside, this might be a peeve. There are worse peeves.  Like undocumented databases.  I'd rahter have a tinyint column called iDoNothing with a corresponding document that states:

iDoNothing

Bulk Insert or DTS packages can achieve this.

Microsoft has articles on line at MSDN.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/odbcsql/od_6_040_101f.asp

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/instsql/in_backcomp_1cxl.asp

I'm more inclined to use DTS packages when I need to modify columns...