Jeff Moden (10/8/2013)

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Matt Miller (#4) (10/8/2013)

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While I don't necessarily disagree with the discussion - it's important to remember that complex is often a point of view. Jeff , what you call simple took me 6 months of decomposing to even comprehend the first time I saw it. The tally table tricks, quirky update, and command of BCP is stuff I simply just don't use enough to stay as good on those as I'd like to.

I'm not sure where you're going with that. Like anyone else, more than 99% of what I do or have other people do revolves only around the "core"/"simple" knowledge that we've been speaking of and none of that is "complex".

Ironically, what I do find is that many people actually make things more complex by not knowing the simple core technology, and I do mean simple. For example, how many times have you and I seen people use a While loop to update one table from another one row at a time simply because they don't know the core technology of how to correctly form a much more simple joined UPDATE even at simple ANSI levels? How many times have you and I seen people use complex IF logic in their stored procedures because the don't understand the simple core logic of CASE fuctionality?

Simple is fine thing to strive for, but you can't always code to the lowest common denominator on the team.

Absolutely agreed on that but don't confuse "simple" with coding to the lowest common denominator. That's not the "simple" I'm talking about. But you also don't need to write a CLR to do something "simple" like generating random integers.

Even for non-core knowledge, how hard is it to learn what a BCP format file is to import a fixed-field file usig BULK INSERT? Heh... and don't think for a minute that I have what a BCP format file needs to look like memorized. I have to look it up every time because, like you, I don't have to do it all that often. But that brings us to another "core" technology that's terribly overlooked. It's in "Books Online" and more than half the "developers" that I've interviewed don't even know what that is.