Great article, great editorial.

I'll be sharing both with my work mates.

Must be time for that holiday (and I would NEVER take my technology with me).

Thanks Andy and Steve. This is...

do you mean before you update?

If you are inserting then there is no old value.

Select the data out before you do the update. Once you have updated it, it's gone,...

Define what you mean by invalid?

Do you mean they reference columns or tables that do not exist?

This is the syntax we use

ALTER TABLE tablename ADD

CONSTRAINT constraint_name ...

Permissions is always the first place to look.

Are you logging in as the same user that you use when not remote?

I presume you could see all that you wanted when...

I believe he was suggesting that you could use SQL_variant for both values

You can always go looking i nthe INFORMATION_SCHEMA views that are available

SELECT *

FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.Columns

WHERE TABLE_NAME = 'your_table_name'

My guess would be that you can only return a single datatype option for a given column (derived or otherwise) and the second CAST statement is taking precedence.

Also, it appears...

The grouping idea was purely off the top of my head and not something I've actually tried, but it appears from what Dinikar had to say, you shouldn't need to...

I can only assume it has something to do with the tutorials and samples - which I haven't looked at yet.

I would presume one of these tutorials might be related...

No, I don't think you're doing anything wrong.

I've just had a look at one of our client production servers and can see activity in terms of file dates having been...

From the SQL Server "Documentation and Tutorials" menu

If you did not install the samples and the AdventureWorks sample database during SQL Server 2005 Setup, you can install them after Setup...

As I understand it :-

If you don't create a rowguidcol on your table, SQL Server will do it for you.

the Rowguidcol is the column that is referenced within the meta...

I did a little test by updating some data - saw no change in the file.

So I bounced the sql server service and then I could see that all files...

I did consider that it was a simplified query, but went ahead anyway.

Apparently you can tell which part of a query gets executed first from the query plan as I...