Thanks for doing this Steve - I/we can be solitary in our work so an encouraging voice is a blessing, and maybe just enough to keep us going.  We can...

Drop DST has my vote.  Sounds like the consensus - internal GMT, display adjusted local time, forget DST with apologies to Mr Franklin. 
Some states are going to vote...

Hearken back to much exaggerated and feared Y2K project...

I was responsible for assessing risk and proposing mitigation for a large hospital chain. 
Mostly with common sense...

That phrase was originally designed for typists because in the original form it uses every letter of the alphabet - so what is missing?  The letter 's' - the original...

Hi Steve,
I'm planning a new web application and am considering Azure as the platform.  Having read this older article of yours, I'm hoping you have either more info on...

Good solution Mak - clean, easy to inline so no udf performance hit - interesting if there are any counter points/other ideas

Not sure how this is supposed to work

I tried highlighting a table name in Object Explorer and pressing [Ctrl] 9 but get nothing

Tried dragging table name onto new query page,...

Hi Eugene,

I wish it were that easy but the first problem is that the data is in a very large varbinary field(64-100Mb) that contains 50-150,000 lines (delimited Char(10)) as hex:

0x232053696D436F72652E646C6C0D0A232076657273696F6E3A2031352D30342D323820623035393438382028723132383130290D0A23206275696C643A20202031352D30342D3239206C61625F63692052656C656173654943432833322D626974290D0A23204

From...

On my system the first insert worked,. the second fail for constraint violation and neither index was disabled... what gives Steve?

Thanks Jeff and Lowell,

Just to clarify the data, it looks like this in the table:

0x0A0D302064657070696B5365426F5464656B72614D73766F4D6D754E646E

From this I need to break it into manageable (VARCHAR) pieces, like this...

He Jeff,

The primary key is a GUID called ID - not my idea, but this is an inherited database...

What I need is a count of each of the 3 or...

Hi Alan,

The converted string (from varbinary) looks like these 3 records (targets around position 40 but may be up to position 73, ergo my thought on REGEX...):

...

Hi Jeff,

I agree that would be easiest however that still leaves the existing records, is there a smarter way of dealing with them?

Maybe I should build the search in binary...

Depending on how you are setup, i.e.; number of databases and files - the SQL Activity monitor gives decent but coarse IO numbers.

At the database level, the standard report...

Most of (99+%) there is a discrete list of columns. Unfortunately I will end up parsing the binary data in the LOBs for another project.

Thank you for your help here,...