Just out of curiosity:

Is it for an OLAP or OLTP application?

Well, Date's book might turn out to be a little too academic for someone starting with this topic. So, it might prove contraproductive.

One website dedicated to modeling can be...

Why don't you contact the vendor of your SAN and see what he suggest? EMC, for example, has several case studies on its website. Might be a place to start.

To add to Adam:

Almost each possible question on this topic has already been answered before with an at least effective answer. A simple search in the Google archives (or other...

See if this helps:

DECLARE @SqlStatement nvarchar(4000)

DECLARE @DatabaseName sysname

DECLARE DatabaseNames CURSOR

LOCAL FAST_FORWARD READ_ONLY FOR

SELECT CATALOG_NAME

FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.SCHEMATA

OPEN DatabaseNames

WHILE 1 = 1

BEGIN

FETCH NEXT FROM DatabaseNames

...

With the best workaround probably being the advise to do this at the client or use a staging table with a text column.

But like Adam already said, without more information...

Read the article, very interesting and gave me some pointers but still doesn't convince me that this isn't worth a shot. Thanks

Some wiser German than me once stated :

"Against stupidity...

Pretty useless after the fact has occured unless you want to slap someone on his hand.

What about reviewing your permission concept? Why does...

ISNULL or COALESCE (for that matter) come in very handy at times.

To add to Antares; are you trying to reinvent the wheel?

Well, it has been mentioned before, that you might be better off doing this at the client. If you base your solution on Joe's suggestion along with a SELECT like...

See if this helps.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;310650

It will also lead you to other articles

Here's an interesting white-paper:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/2000/maintain/ss2kidbp.mspx

You might be better off posting this to an Oracle site like

http://www.orafaq.com

Well, basically I used the MAX() function, because I read the response from the original questioner to the cross join solution. Before that it wasnt' clear to me, what the...

Why a cross join?

USE pubs

SELECT

 MAX(MaxSpaltenWert) AS MaxTabellenWert

FROM

 (

   SELECT max(job_id) AS MaxSpaltenWert FROM employee

   UNION ALL

   SELECT max(job_lvl) AS MaxSpaltenWert FROM employee

&nbsp orig_t

MaxTabellenWert...