Good question!

There's no VARCHAR(MAX) in SQL Server 2000 either...

Travis:

Are you implying that you've never done anything stupid by accident? Did you get fired for it? People make mistakes, and if a manager is so much of...

Nate:

Look up WAITFOR in the SQL Server 2005 Books Online.

Satendra:

Are you SURE?

On my system, the following shows that in this case, table variables are over 100 times slower on average than temp tables:

----

set nocount on

declare @startdate datetime

set @startdate =...

No, in that article he showed that temp tables can be faster. Not are faster.

Case in point, I just finished doing some performance tuning on a stored procedure at...

David,

Get a copy of Jeffrey Richter's _Applied Microsoft .NET Framework Programming_ -- It's language independent and focuses on the framework itself. If you understand how the framework works, picking...

I'm not certain that your stored procedure is thread safe. Remember, multiple processes may call this at the same time -- the file will be locked if someone else...

Agreed on NULL avoidance!

Unfortunately, due to the way OUTER JOINs work, all DBAs still must be educated on the proper use of NULL and 3VL, even if the database has...

Great job on the article!

As for the questions on the blog post, I'd say use COALESCE even if it is sometimes a tiny bit slower... That post was just done...

Talltop:

NOT EXISTS is -usually- better than NOT IN, but not always. There are situations in which the optimizer can in-line the subquery, effectively converting it into an OUTER JOIN....

Hmm, worst question in weeks...

EXISTS is a set predicate.

LIKE is a scalar predicate.

The two can and should not be compared. They are not equivalent and one cannot perform...

How was RI not the "right" answer?

That's *always* the right answer. In every case. Data archiving is secondary to ensuring data integrity.

Not so fast, Antonio....

declare @var as varchar(100)

set @var = '1e'

if (isnumeric(@var)=0) --isnumeric return '0' false

print 'yes'

else

print 'no'

Done this one or two or -maybe- three times in the past

I think you can enable implicit transactions by default in QA --...