In our shop we have both professional SQL programmers and non professional SQL users.  The rampant use of dynamic SQL by the non-professionals is one of the most common sources...

We maintain a global holiday table for stock trading and settlement.  The main table is supported by a little system with half a dozen tables and a couple of procedures. ...

Thanks.  Options are good!

We are starting to investigate SQL + R.  Would that be a good approach to this problem?  Is it still too soon for this technology combination to have caught hold...

Thanks for the article.  I found the part about the relative security of SQL vs domain accounts instructive.

Re writing backups to a share from multiple servers, how would...

"I can calculate the movements of stars but not the madness of men."

Isaac Newton

Your example states your procedure will return customer count for each employee but your temp table holds customer count by store. Am I missing something? Is there only...

This sounds like an application for log shipping.

Thanks for the useful script.

I think your approach will work on non-SQL servers as well. We are a small shop and we do something similar but include all servers. We collect statistics...

Thank you for looking into this ChrisM and Eirikur. My last contribution, i.e. the bit about special case data versus random data in the #hidvals table led to the...

I think I have at least a partial explanation re the slow/fast query.

The query produces two different execution plans. If table #hidvals is a heap, the optimizer generates plan...

That last reply should say 'with either or both" not "of both"