No test can reveal how an employee would perform in the future. Some minimum standards are necessary, at least to weed out clearly unqualified people. Past experience, certificates, degrees, and...

Good parsing technique.

Even though @strDataSet is declared as max, aren't the procedure parameters limited to max length of only 128 characters? That limits the longest string that can be...

Yes indeed, and after looking Quadrant screen casts using...

"SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) is a victory of ingenuity and energy..."

Thanks for a good laugh. I always thought of SSMS as a mobile home attached to the space shuttle.

Yes CTEs have their role but I'm wondering if it's a replacement in an highly optimized star schema warehousing solution.

On the plus side, the date format in the CTE...

Wonderful.

Even more useful is the idea that your technique can bridge grammars between SQL and other external apps and not just search.

UNION, INTERSECT, and EXCEPT round out basic set operations at the domain level (with tables) instead of the tuple level (with joins). Domain level operations can make code in some...

A lot of times it also depends on who is asking you to the job, how is it being asked, and what comes after (net +ve or -ve). If the...

Compared to the stability and usability of Enterprise Manager it replaced, there's no contest. There...

SSMS is probably the weakest link in the entire SQL tool chain.

One automatic way to...

For several of applications, I implemented VCS functionality in SQL using these steps:

1. Create a database trigger to capture DDL events using EventData() in xml format. I include other metadata...

This is another sign that normal order of things, such as perf eval, annual reviews, peer feedback, and so on are not working. In one organization I worked, we had...

Reminds me of Bobby Tables cartoon. ;=)

Besides the obvious injection issues that need to be closed, security can be made only as strong the organization wants. I've seen situations where...

A company used to award free home computer until a couple of years later one employee refused. Then everyone caught on that the home computer put them on-call for anything...