I'm rather surprised that anyone is still surprised about this. For 30 years Microsoft has been about marketing and sales, not about technology.

Lynn Pettis (1/6/2010)

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My daughters are excelling. Oldest has already graduated high school, and probably would have done much better had we gotten her into the high school she graduated...

Because...

I must say I'm rather shocked at some of the responses in this thread.

First of all, to say that men are better at thinking logically than women is...

In fact it was the inadequacy of testing against random production data and it's likelihood of allowing the re-entrance of previously fixed bugs ("brittleness" or worse) that led to the...

Steve Jones - Editor (5/13/2009)

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Andrew is pretty on here with what I think. The exceptions I'd make for production data is in a brake/fix or User Acceptance Test environment where...

Andrew Hatfield (5/13/2009)

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It is concerning that your developers believe they not only require production data, but that they are unable to do their job without it. I'd be looking...

But that's the whole point, isn't it? ...

I wouldn't worry much about Dev yet. Sounds like you've got a huge job ahead just limiting Test and Prod.

First you have to find someone that can and will...

I'm going to disagree with a lot of this, and say "It Depends". If you have a database that is 200MB of data for a home grown app with...

"It Depends" what you consider duplicate data. Is the price of a Product duplicate data on Sales Order or Invoice if the Price is also stored in the Inventory...

I'll jump on the bandwagon here. When designing a database, I first normalize and see where that gets us. When requirements or performance demand denormalization, there isn't anything...

Northwind is great because of it's simplicity. Anyone can understand it. To improve it would be to completely destroy it's purpose. If you want to create a...

A few comments...

I haven't really tried linked server, but I don't think there would be a big issue. The ODBC driver has improved immensely in the last few versions....

I agree with those that say cheating has always been there. Every time I hear or read anything that starts with "Todays younger generation..." I roll my eyes. ...