My rule of thumb:  If it's re-usable and the performance isn't bad then put it in a function (Think OO).  Otherwise use Procs.  Functions don't necessarily get executed for each...

In defense of identity columns:

I've found that identity columns are key when summarizing data in RealTime.  I use what I call a "Collector" to do this.  A table called "CollectorDatabase"...

I can tell you a low tech way of doing this.

In our situation clients are sending us data to import.  They drop of the file, then drop off a "Trigger"...

Gerry,

Yeah, there's always a trade-off.  I found that over all OO programming does not perform as well as set based procedural programming like in SQL.  I'm all about performance, which...

Gerry,

There is something else you should think about, specifically related to object oriented concepts.  Putting your complex code in a function makes a whole lot of sense when you're talking...

If you use a composite clustered index on all your lookup columns you will get "Index Seek" lookups.  These are the fastest by far; it doesn't matter if you have...

Arshad,

Use DTS in Enterprise Manager (Data Transformation Services|Local Packages).

It will take you literally 5 minutes to set this up; it's incredibly simple.  Set up a SQL destination database, an Excel...

sorry, didn't mean to mention the "o" word ; and I was off topic besides.

customsw, if you want to encrypt your code don't put...

I could not agree with katesl more; sell services not applications.  We've got an application (was here when I got here where the...

R,

Techically, you can the Update DML statement in a UDF, but it can't affect any tables outside the udf.

If you wanted to do that you'd have to write like so:

Update t 

set column1=f.column1     

from...

Ben,

I use @@version from the tSQL command line ("select @@version").  I have to parse the string, but it's not to bad and is backwardly compatible.

I wouldn't know how to do...

As far as I know using # and ## tables will force your proc to always recompile.  If you have to use a temp table internal to the proc (for...

Comment:

good luck, and I mean it!  It would be very useful to be able to script out an object-model of the db schema without any stupid manual steps.  I hope...

You need to join on the date and time, so you'll have to parse each out of the datetime value separately.

First, parsing date.  Look at the "Convert" functions and see...

Ah!  That's the ticket, Billy; thank you very much.  It wasn't showing up as a syntax error because of aliasing, which totally threw me off.

"with schemabinding"....that works like a charm. ...