Steve, it is a very good idea.

It only has the potential, as any flexible model does, to shift the balance of power to the employer's side,

resulting in lower wages, more...

everything fine, but what's that checksum for ?

This is strange. try the following

create procedure test1 as return null

go

declare @rc int = 991

exec @rc=test1

print @rc

--> you get

The 'test1' procedure attempted to return...

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same with tables : to my knowledge, tables included in a view, which are not needed for satisfying colunms and do not influence the number of rows returned (that is...

Put a view on top of changed definitions which provides original layout.

i DO renaming.

To find all references to the old name i use script which simply scrawls through all my sources

and looks for occurrences of the old name.

there is an issue when renaming a module: the name in syscomments (create procedure .... ) is not updated.

and if you use the source from syscomments e.g. to deploy the...

Was thinking along the same lines för quite a time.

But: the optimizer is not an angel,

and in practice it is often much faster to use an intermediate result...

"Being a CTE, its code must be preceded by a semicolon."

That's not quite true. Would rather suggest:

Any preceding statement must be terminated by a semicolon.

In in inline CTE, there is...

type this =2^15 into google and you get 32768.

No big issue.

the general ideas outlined in this article are worth thinking over them.

However, what is stated therein, cannot be taken as matter of fact, because the optimizer

has its own ways.

Just an...

so, in one or two sentences: what do you suggest ?

One word about the term DUPLICATE.

This generally means two entities having identical attributes, as in DUPLICATE KEY.

This also means that in removing duplicates you may choose any of the duplicate...

You want to select all but the newest record, so,

why can't you say that ?