Unlikely since it was just a few months ago; but like I said, a surprising number of companies still have to go through this exercise for the first time.

Thanks everyone for the positive article rating. I realize there's nothing controversial or interesting in this piece to generate much conversation for the old hands but if anyone new has...

Pardon me while I vent while we're on the topic of SANs: I've discovered there are good SAN admins and bad SAN admins. The bad ones say 'SAN is teh...

I recommend PerfectDisk - I remember we bought it to use on the SQL Server based data warehouse because the staging environment did a lot of updates and deletes and...

Did you consider a third party disk deframenter like PerfectDisk? It does not have the free space requirements of the Windows defragmenter.

I have a worse horror story: One day...

dg81328 (4/11/2011)

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Not a bug in SQL Server because you can choose a different collation when you are setting up SQL Server. It is more of a human bug for not...

I think the first assertion needs a slight modification; a first version DW should produce one reporting subject area, not just one report. From there, it's a question of how...

I was once given a 3 page (front and back) written test on the software and concepts used in the position because so many posers had been hired and fired...

Check this out: My friendly local Oracle DBA told me Oracle is backwards!

select 'A' from dual where 1/0 = 1 AND 1=0;

(at least on Oracle 10g) will give an empty...

You did the wrong test. You should have done "where 1=0 AND 1/0 = 1" or "where 1=1 or 1/0 = 1". Remember: AND short-circuits on false, OR short-circuits on...

Excellent article - For more fun, check other DBMSes. I checked on Oracle and "select 'A' from dual where 1=0 or 1/0 = 1;" gives a division by zero error....

fn_varbintohexstr ?

I think this is the same...

I understand random numbers for some cases but it seems strange here. If the purpose is to encrypt real EINs then one of the built in encryption routines would...

Calculating...