One of the most common mistakes made in T-SQL is thinking that these behave identically.  I've personally opened up a forum topic on it because I didn't know what the difference was.  This post will join a small army of other places on the net devoted to correcting this misunderstanding.… Read more

After a while, most people who work with SQL have accumulated quite a few scripts that they use for investigation, troubleshooting, commonly requested ad hoc queries etc.  I've seen people suggest a few different methods for keeping this 'script library' available on several different machines.  Some people recommend saving everything… Read more

Overview
This is something that most people eventually need for reporting purposes.  This function uses a Tally table to 'clean' a string, removing anything you don't specify in the @Rep parameter.  In the case below, I remove everything but letters, numbers, spaces, commas and periods.  This is a slightly modified… Read more

It seems like every blog I read has a list of goals posted for the year.  This seems like a pretty good idea and I thought I'd follow suit.  The following are my professional goals for 2010.  I've noted my current values of some of the things as a public… Read more