Re SET and SELECT, is there a realistic scenario OTHER than capturing previous statement's @@ERROR and @@ROWCOUNT where a single statement must be used? I think it's the only one that I've wanted.

I hadn't thought of the trick on that Web page of converting them to strings and concatenating them, to get both values captured by a SET statement. Effective - but ugly.

I suppose there isn't much point asking whether ANSI requires that each SET statement resets @@ROWCOUNT to 1 after execution - whether that's an ANSI rule or not, we are stuck with it. (Or are we?)