Yes, for new, uncertain/timid posters this av comes off bad, intimidating, etc. 

Even for those not so timid, one is uncertain what to make of it.

If you do not want...

Left field question: Are these numbers actually there or are they a floating point margin of error on the client side?  (some numeric values may be interpreted/flipped by client side...

I'm pretty sure someone else will have a better solution than this:

SELECT COALESCE( a1.id, a2.id, a3.id) as id, a1.val1, a2.val2, a3.val3

  FROM (

         select distinct id, val1 from #t

        ...

OK, insert standard disclaimer about what you need this for and this not necessarily being the best solution..., but, I have done this in the past:

select a + char(13) +...

(in regards to intellectual property)

The battle has been over and lost for a long time.  What you see as conflict now is just scattered feeding frenzy resolutions.

IP is a bad...

I can't answer that question directly, but here's what I do:

I have an "Execute SQL" step at the start of my data load DTS which issues a truncate on each...

This is a tough subject.  It has been going on for as long as there have been journals, online or not.  I've had friends offered hardware and other rewards for...

This is one of those issues...

When I have clients call me up with problems like this I tell them:  If you have SA access I'll spend ten minutes with...

He meant that the client application has to be coded in such a way as to provide it (hostname) when logging in.  If the client app doesn't provide it, you...

BEGIN TRAN

update tablename with (HOLDLOCK)

set somecolumn = 'X' WHERE anycolumn = nopossiblematch

and then don't issue a commit tran

but the bigger question is why or what are you really trying to do?

(From what I know...)

Yes it includes the text (varchar) column.  (even though you think it's 4k because of nvarchar it may be 2 bytes per position).

So, in order to do...

Only for the duration of each individual delete.  That is DML from other connections will pause and continue after each pass of the loop.

Unfortunately you may eventually lose the war.  The seductive sloppiness of microsoft development environments will continue to lead developers down the dark side.

Connection issues like this are very common in...

I don't have a good answer for you.  That is, (as far as I know) it gets really tricky to change the replication settings on a db once you've copied...

Send me a PM if you don't find an answer to this.

I wrote a few generic utility functions for this specific task (scrambling data for testing) and they're all ready...