I've gotta agree with Michael... the questions have gotten a lot worse. Yeah, I agree that they're probably for the reasons Steve and a couple of others have identified, but WOW!
And, it's not only the questions... it's some of the gosh-awful answers... in one very recent post for SSIS, one poor fellow wanted to know how to get the numeric value out of a string like A07689 and join it on a column that had 007689 in it. Now, forget how bad a design that is... consider the answer that one wiz kid gave...
"You should be using derived column transformation, and use substring or available string functions. This would help." ... and that's ALL that was given as an answer.
Technically correct and, yet, totally useless. There's been a rash of such answers, lately... must be the economy... seems like when the DOW goes down, so does the IQ of the general public. 😛 Just imagine... some of these folks actually have jobs in the IT world. :hehe:
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.