The number one rule of a primary key is that it must be "meaningless" yet unique. To be meaningless it must not be one of your four columns that...

DECLARE @t TABLE (line varchar(100));

INSERT into @t VALUES ('ELA-DUPLECHEIN, KELLIE-13-14-2(A-B)');

INSERT INTO @t VALUES ('READING -LANDRY, MICHELE B-13-14-2(A)');

SELECT

CASE WHEN a > 0 AND b> 0 THEN SUBSTRING(line, a+1, b-1) ELSE line...

Customers generally don't remember how their own backup scheme is set up. Jumping into the history files has helped me know the chain of full and log backups and...

I've used tables containing base data for calculating TimeZones and Daylight Savings Times for any year. But, let me tell you they were a royal mess to deal with....

I've used calendar tables for all manufacturing sites; they always contained one row per day.

In my opinion the very biggest reason to create a calendar table is to know the...

I'd probably insert the thousand rows into a table variable first. Then, insert the set in one shot. In either case it should take less than a second...

You may create constraints and indexes on temporary tables. I think you would benefit by having a regular table; that way you could depend on constraints and indexes and...

My preference is also for UDTTs. Unfortunately, I think Microsoft faked the implementation by creating a temp table in tempdb and passing that to the stored procedure resulting in...

Your easiest solution might be to do this simple change. If a parameter is given a value, then a subset of rows will be returned. If the parameter...

Two more questions I've had for some time.

Are table and column check constraints actually different or is it just a semantic difference? And do they fire differently?

Do FOREIGN KEYS...

Thanks for doing so much work figuring out the order of constraints. I looked last week and could not find Microsoft documentation on it.

The problem is bigger....

This reminds me of the Chinese food menu with 200+ numbered items. If you look at just the headings you can see all items are repeated for beef, pork,...

I'm currently reading a book that beautifully covers the ideas expressed in this editorial.

Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance

by Atul Gawande

Link: http://amzn.com/0805082115

From my perspective, a programmer better meet the...

declare @t table ( birthdate date, age as datediff(year,birthdate,getdate()) ) ;

insert into @t (birthdate) values ('20000101')

select * from @t

I can't say for sure without a query plan although I virtually always get much better results breaking a monolithic query into several separate queries and using "procedural" step logic...