Contracts or price agreements are generally effective for a predetermined time span thus waranting a begin/end date pair. A status, on the other hand, is a state of a...

Converting varchar to numeric is inherently unsafe unless the data is app generated and not user entered. You will have random errors depending on which range of rows your...

The phrase "survival of the fittest" falls short of reality which uses "survival of the fittest for unknown upcoming conditions". Its even more complicated because right now what is...

A different rand() value per row is possible with a little bit of convoluted work:

CREATE VIEW rnd AS SELECT RAND() AS nbr;

CREATE FUNCTION GetRnd() RETURNS real AS

BEGIN

DECLARE @r real

SET @r...

Data is cheap and ubiquitous. It is lower than information, which is organized data. Data has its own attributes such as quality, timeliness, and accuracy that only the...

Environment is everything. Check the big picture before checking the small picture.

Developers will tell me procedure XYZ is timing out on a customer's site and needs optimized. The...

After two hours of 100% CPU usage, I killed the solver proc. I've seen other solvers that work in a second or two.

I finally figured out the undocumented generator...

I'm reminded of the saying "Make things as simple as possible but not simpler". In other words, you may have assumed too simple of an answer.

An accepted hierarchy for...

You can't go by visible output. SqlServer uses buffers for output so you'll only retrieve full pages but there might be some remaining rows waiting for the buffer page...

I see plenty of case statements and implicit conversions going on which leads me to believe the second SELECT which has no rows, data types can't be figured out. ...

The parser is very forgiving of formatting. If you think of 4-part names as each part being independent and as overriding a default scope, it will make sense to...

I think the main reason for sql_variants has been missed here and are therefore being bashed unfairly. Their purpose is to allow different data types to be stored in...

A deadlock victim message/error is an expected situation. SQL Server rolls back your transaction and expects you to try again with likely success. Because it is a recoverable...

To be chosen as a deadlock victim, two threads must be inside transactions. If thread one updates tableA then tableB while thread two updates tableB then tableA AND both...

Views might work for a small subset of DDL changes since views are rarely update-able when based on more than one table. How can you handle a case where...