Well my connection must have been refreshed shortly after posting this because I was demonstrating it for my boss and it worked... DOH. So then I tried a third...

Maybe I should have rephrased my previous post.

When I said "why would you need a transaction log at all", what I meant was, why would you need to hold onto...

To answer your questions the best I can:

As stated above, backups in any version of SQL Server are all online.

Restores, technically, are not online except in the case...

I was under the impression, generally speaking, that the master db doesn't change that much or very often at all. That being the case, why would you need transaction...

Don't forget the hardware issue! Besides restoring over a network, it could be that your DB is taking so long to restore because the hardware is either old or...

SQL Server doesn't really do data comparisons in the literal sense. For that, you're better served by looking into third party tools like Red Gate's SQL Data Compare. ...

Not to complain, since I got the question right, but the answer that shows up on the webpage says Fast Parse doesn't support leading white spaces. In fact, if...

Andrew,

Thanks for the information on the BI cert. I've been looking everywhere for additional information on what it covers. Though, I was surprised to see you list two...

Matt,

I absolutely LOVE your .sig! @=)

As far as your answer goes... Hmm. I was afraid you were going to say that. Oh, well. In this particular...

If you want to do this, I suggest using a combination of Substring() and PatIndex(). Use the PatIndex() to find the spaces in your names and then the Substring()...

At some point earlier in the year, someone did suggest you could call Microsoft and ask them if you could upgrade straight from SQL 7 to 2k5. But other...

It occurs to me that what I really need to do, to keep the table dynamic, is to make an image out of the result set of the Proc and...

That's a wonderful resource, but unfortunately, it doesn't help me in this particular situation for several reasons.

1) I've already written my dynamic pivot script as T-SQL and it works great.

2)...

I had a query where I was pulling directly from the linked server (multiple tables in JOINs) with a SELECT statement on the destination server. After reading Steve's article,...

Actually, those are the sorts of "Lessons Learned" you could pick up from your first IT job too. It doesn't have to be college. @=)