I got it wrong because I figured it had to be more complicated than I thought. D'oh

Yeah, I can't really say too much as I've got some no-brainers wrong before too.

I was shocked to see only 49% getting this right (when I checked). Surely all DBAs should be all over this one.

Probably shouldn't have run the code then.

The title of the question was 'BETWEEN' therefore it was obviously going to test your between knowledge. Stop complaining and get back to work.

I think there are 2 points to this question:

1) The fact the function did not throw an error about the input being truncated; and;

2) The length of the return string.

I...

Thanks for your help guys.

I was able to get the indexid from sys.partitions, then the index name from sys.indexes.

Awesome work, much appreciated.

I just want to thank the author. I have limited exposure to XML, and as a result have never really thought about it.

I think in the future I will make...

Thanks all for your help - I appreciate it.

When you say target table, are you referring to the destination table populated by the third party application?

I may be missing something, but couldn't you just modify the select clause on the spreadsheet and manually cast to the correct datatype?

Would a nice solution be to create a federated database, with each node being a high availability cluster?

By having each node in the federation being a high availability cluster, that...