Adrian Green (8/10/2009)

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Overall I've rated this article poorly. Sorry, a "Top Twenty Tips" sounds good (a nice bit alliteration), but unfortunately for a topic as complex as this you can...

oli (8/10/2009)

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I find that the nice highlighting in SSMS more than adequate and a lot easier on the eyes...

GilaMonster (8/10/2009)

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rja.carnegie (8/10/2009)

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How much space does a variable consume? I assume kilobytes at most typically, which is really nothing at all. I mean, you aren't going to use...

How much space does a variable consume? I assume kilobytes at most typically, which is really nothing at all. I mean, you aren't going to use thousands of...

Coded language is underhand. It does exist in other fields of endeavour. For instance, a politician dreads being praised for a "brave" decision.

It occurs to me that "Exceptional"...

MAXDOP 0 -is- the number of cores on the server (allowed to SQL Server, which may be fewer than "all").

So what does MAXDOP 0 achieve?

I assumed that MAXDOP limited absolutely the number of cores allocated to a session, query, or batch. Is that not so?

I wonder if parallelism-waiting is a fault. Naturally,...

I'd call...

Although QOD is often described or answered in slightly broken English that suggests a location requiring nchar, I think there are more locations that don't than some people are imagining....

Fixing the bugs an exercise for the student?

With similar needs I've been caught out where I'd prefer to include more than one short first word, such as "St"...

If test.txt is where you're reading data from, that isn't delimited, it's fixed lengths. If it's a one-off job, or even if it isn't, DTS is more capable -...

I have more experience of 2000's maintenance plan facility, and of DTS. We're only now moving to 2005. Of the tools I know better, I prefer scripts because...

Technically the QUOTENAME() function should be considered for quoting schema and object names, such as

EXEC ( '

CREATE TABLE [#stupid[reallystupid]]tablename] (i int NOT NULL)

SELECT * FROM [#stupid[reallystupid]]tablename]

SELECT * FROM tempdb.INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES...