"Well, you should know your DB better than me :-)) maybe I'm overacting, but it really pays to be careful in case of such data manipulation."

No, you're not overacting (or...

Kevin,

You are not being very clear; it seems like you are asking if SQL can store strings?  I mean, it's obvious that SQL will store strings, I'm sure you know...

Steve,

You have articles published weekly in a well-respected website, and you write a editorial nearly every day that goes out to (hundreds?...thousands?) of people.  If this isn't a journalist I...

How 'bout one of those puppies, only 3D? http://www.physorg.com/news3296.html

Nice little article.  I would expand this concept to include many different situations when I want to disconnect the logical and physical data storage.

Don't let anyone scare you against using...

Definitely a set-based solution is always best, and you're right that many loops can be converted into set-based processing.

That's not what we were talking about, though; we were talking about...

Actually...it is significantly different, per my optimizer it costs 2.5% of the total cost of both (although this includes creating the table variable, which I would HOPE you had in...

You can rename indexes and other objects:

use pubs

if object_ID('test_rename_HIS') is not null drop table test_rename_HIS

if object_ID('test_rename_ARC') is not null drop table test_rename_ARC

create table test_rename_HIS

  (ID int Not Null constraint PK_HIS Primary...

BCP with a dynamic file format is pretty hard to set up.  You need to open the file and figure out the number of columns, then set up the file...

You know, the last time I checked there was no "journalism" clause in the constitution; the 1st Ammendment is supposed to protect us all. 

Per Wikipedia, a journalist is "a person...

Pretty good article, with some nice tips.  Regarding PW's note, it's a valid option, but no real performance increase over using variables.

Situation 3 looks dicey, though.  I understand what you're trying...

Frank has a great point above removing all characters except for letters.  However, if you have a predefined list you want to remove, the technique below works really well.

The big...

A mildly entertaining ("after a few beers" funny, I mean) movie by the same name :

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0217630/

And remember that Beck song?

Maybe your file name is "C:\Temp.xml" instead of "C:\emp.xml"?  Slow down....

That code you found is pretty crappy anyway....here's some better stuff (still limited to 8000 characters, though):

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

DECLARE @FileName varchar(255)

DECLARE @ExecCmd...