Interesting topic, Steve

In general, I agree. The best way is the way that gets the job done effectively, and the best of two equally effective ways is the one you're most comfortable with.

The more I work with SQL Server, the less I feel any kind of affilliation with it. That sounds harsh, but my DBA career started with Oracle, and it's simply a reflection that I'm finding SQL Server as just as effective within the remits I've given it. In effect, I started off biased towards Oracle, and the more I use SQL Server, the more I'm comfortable with the idea that different RDBMS's are just different tools to achieve much the same effect. Certainly, each has its strengths and weaknesses, but they're tools - no more, no less.

And that goes for areas within it, right down to minor syntactical detail (I usually use convert instead of cast).

However, I'm a little more twitchy regarding what you were saying about defaults. Back in the day (to use a fairly simple analogy), the biggest difference in security and stability between Windows NT and UNIX wasn't bad code; it was defaults. "This is a whizzy new feature, let's enable it by default." It was perfectly possible to securely lock down an NT server, just as it was perfectly possible to open up a UNIX server, but the main difference was the vendors' choices regarding defaults.

Right now, Microsoft is older and wiser, as is the UNIX/Linux community. MS products are more secure than they used to be, and UNIX/Linux products are more user-friendly. However, I'm still not sure that any particular default setting is set by the manufacturer for a good, random or expedient reason, and that goes for ANY software, not just OS's, RDBMS's, whatever. Unfortunately, nor do I have any good suggestion as to how to improve things.