I remember an earlier post https://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/honorifics-in-the-21st-century by Randolph West (they/them) which was about personal pronouns. So should it not be "I saw some thoughts from Randolph West recently that caught...

Jeff Moden's function ShowLongString is just what I was looking for.  I use it as a better alternative for sp_helptext to quickly view the code of a procedure or function.

Adding...

I'd write it like this:

IF @X = 1 BEGIN
    RETURN 'xyz';
END
ELSE BEGIN
    RETURN 'abc';
END;

Indeed preferable, since it should prevent errors like:

Good work. I'd like to suggest a few additions with regard to your examples:

• Only use IF with BEGIN and END. That should be mandatory in my opinion.
• CONCAT is...

I tried the CreateMerge procedure since it might be useful.
The procedure however has a few issues:
[1] - the column order of the source is (sometimes?) alphabetically, and...

Thank you, Gail and Scott, for the answers.

Much appreciated.

Maybe this https://www.simple-talk.com/sql/database-administration/using-migration-scripts-in-database-deployments/ may be of use. This formed the basis for our scripts.

We use one script to update data models of two versions of the same application. (Though we...

Voted.... in favour of TheTotalTally^(tm).

Happy New Year to everyone!

A few things come to mind when reading the article.

1. Kate Bush's album '50 Words for Snow' - excellent stuff.

2. An uncle talking about his database containing a few hundred...

Good article, and better than its rating indicates. (So I gave it 5 * to balance it.)

A few days ago I captured this in a trace, when a customer complained...

Weird. I gave the wrong answer ( error, error, 0 ) and scratched my head trying to figure out what was wrong.

Then after my first coffee I suddenly noticed the...

My last remark about Ad-hoc code was apparently plain wrong.

The Windows Server is a SBS (Small Business Server) which apparently has some kind of Operations Manager running, continually checking various...

Besides that (almost) no ad-hoc queries.

There is another program from another company on another database which runs just after midnight to create to some files. It uses dynamic SQL - and as far as I...