Jumping on the bandwagon here. This should be "best practice", but in the real world you amazingly seldom see the fully qualified name.

You might also want to search the fora here on this keywords. This has been discussed a great depth recently.

Okay, here's a riddle...

DECLARE @a NCHAR

SET @a = '-'

SELECT DATALENGTH('a1sdsad12---325143gffdfd4dgsf1 -')

      -

      DATALENGTH(REPLACE('a1sdsad12---325143gffdfd4dgsf1 -',@a,''))

-----------

-24

(1 row(s) affected)

Can you tell me why?

Glad it helps.

Hey, I'm still in smilie mood, since I go home now.

Which SQL Server version do you use?

Also, see, if this helps:

http://www.sql-server-performance.com/awe_memory.asp

Glad I could help!

sp_who, sp_who2 and sp_lock might be a start. Profiler, which ships with SQL Server is a good tool, but Optimization is up to yourself. To a certain degree is the...

You can save the change script without the need to apply it to the table. That way you are able to schedule for off-peak hours, as I guess you intend...

As long as the job gets done and all that......

Not really! It could get frustrating, when you do things with EM that takes hours and hours to complete, and complete...

Assuming you want to keep the already existing data, your best bet is to use EM and remove the IDENTITY property there in table design view. Instead of clicking on...

Yes, doing this at the client is surely the best advise.

So far for my pseudo answer just to get the chance to post another smilie

Btw, did someone here ever mentioned that this autoparsing for smilies is a BIT annoying.

SQL Server amazing often uses this reverse mirrored order. It's a bit annoying, but once you know that this is so, it's no big deal at all. I stumbled over...

...well then

Sorry Kathi, but this is not the best solution. I've posted a similar one to the German newsgroup some days ago. And after thinking a night over it, came up...