Dale,

Thanks for taking the time to write a good article. I especially appreciate the screen shots.

A couple questions:

1) Where would you recommend a person go for assistance when the graphical tools are not sufficient?

2) What do you use for optimizations that are not provided in the graphical tools?

3) Why not use views for the type of problems you are presenting in your article. If the primary benefit from the graphical query painter is to provide join and filtering then this kind of work can be done effectively in a view once and used by all users who do not need to have effecient queries.

In short; it appears that your audience is for people to write SQL without knowing how to write SQL. A good DBA will have this already done for those who do not know how to write SQL through Views, User Defined Functions that return tables or Stored Procedures.

Still, I will be passing along your article to co-workers as it represents a lot of questions I answer frequently (sound like a contradiction) because I don't have enough time to do everything ahead of time.

Keep the tips coming.

Ben