Hey, I wouldn't use COALESCE unless I really need the extended functionality compared to ISNULL or have to care about portability. Why? Have a play with this snippets.

CREATE TABLE #t

(

 c1...

I for one wouldn't do any Internal Rate of Return calculations with SQL. Why?

Read this and decide for yourself

http://www.intelligententerprise.com/online_only/celko/030303_1.jhtml

As for your second question:

What I wanted to say, was, that when Microsoft wants SQL 92 entry level conformance (and SQL 2003 conformance) they have to support this syntax. So...

Okay.

First: No answer to the FULL OUTER JOIN question, but regarding the old JOIN syntax this might be interesting http://www.microsoft.com/sql/techinfo/tips/development/July23.asp

Second: No, not really. AFAIK is this a SQL 89...

How would this look like with COALESCE?

What "financial function" are you talking about?

There are quite a few that can easily be transferred to T-SQL. And then you can use the sp_OA* procedures to instanciiate them as...

Allen, nice to see you back here!

That's a very broad question. You might want to read it up in BOL first or here

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnsql2k/html/statquery.asp

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;325024

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;195565

and then come back with more specific questions.

I would say the message is pretty much self-describing. Could it be that any of the above mentioned operations runs while you try to backup the db?

...but actually you don't need another table for it

select

 DESPATCHNOTENUMBER, count(ITEM) as [ITEM]

from

 < your_table >

group by

 DESPATCHNOTENUMBER

should also work fine.

Haha, I know you don't take it too serious!

Here's one smilie of the fun section

Umh, must be the clown in me, but what collation would you suggest on a TINYINT column?

... probably avoid posting such basic questions to this forum which may be catering to pros.

I strongly disagree with this!!!!

Nobody is born as a pro. Everybody started somehow someday and grows...

Hm, here are some ideas if you want to do on the server.

http://www.sommarskog.se/arrays-in-sql.html

Sorry, got somehow lost of this thread.

The 823 error basically says, that this page cannot physically be read from disk. You should replace...