Dennis,

I like your pattern matching approach. However, I was concerned about the 128 extended characters, so I suggest the last condition be modified to changed the ~ to a...

Two points:

One: The initial question was to keep ISV customers from mucking up the database and then blaming the ISV for the problems. In this case we are not...

This batch will tell you where backups will go by default. It works on SQL 2000 and SQL 2008 for me:

[font="Courier New"]declare @data nvarchar(512);

exec master.dbo.xp_instance_regread

N'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE',

...

I wanted to come up with a solution of my own with reading just the statement of the challenge. So, here it is. I took me about 10-15...