Not as scary as...

Phil Factor (11/14/2011)

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On one memorable occasion, I was strolling around an IT department of an international company with the CTO (IT Director actually) chatting about this and that, when we...

majorbloodnock (11/14/2011)

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Arguably, though, the quality of the code doesn't matter; it either fulfills its business requirement or it doesn't. If you need to justify downtime to rewrite portions, then why...

It's probably being used to accommodate a poor level of data normalization (should be rows, not columns), but it's not an uncommon thing to do.

It is, indeed, a "conditional join"....

SanDroid (11/14/2011)

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GSquared (11/14/2011)

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SanDroid (11/14/2011)

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Ninja's_RGR'us (11/14/2011)

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You mean aside from ddl change, performance, network overuse, column order change, performance, indexes being useless, not seing the list of columns when working on the...

He asked about the ID sequence. That should do what's needed. ID can then be used in later Order By clauses to insure sequence.

I use OpenRowset within a T-SQL script for exactly this.

EXEC sp_configure 'xp_cmdshell', 1 ;

RECONFIGURE ;

USE MyDatabase ;

SET NOCOUNT ON ;

IF OBJECT_ID(N'tempdb..#T') IS NOT NULL

DROP TABLE...

David Zuckerman (11/14/2011)

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I really take personal offense at the phrase in the editorial:

"It also seems that many of the people I've met with CS degrees are often those that make...

SanDroid (11/14/2011)

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Ninja's_RGR'us (11/14/2011)

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You mean aside from ddl change, performance, network overuse, column order change, performance, indexes being useless, not seing the list of columns when working on the code?

so aside...

Here's the answer from Microsoft: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqltips/archive/2005/07/20/441053.aspx

Relevant piece:

4.INSERT queries that use SELECT with ORDER BY to populate rows guarantees how identity values are computed but not the order in which the...

Well, most people think the primary use of either of those is to make the query faster. They're wrong, but that's what they think it's for.

Putting both of them...

Same problem with anything implicit in code instead of explicit.

The code calling the proc is then subject to negative impacts from table refactoring. If the sequence of columns is...

Good editorial, good article.

I think two bits sum it up. The statement that people with CS degrees often don't know what they really need to do, and the statement...

Phil Factor (11/12/2011)

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Yes, of course we need to improve the code around us, but it can be done without criticism, in the sense of disparaging the code and the author....

I'm going to have to disagree with you on this one.

There is definitely some code out there that deserves criticism.

I look at some of the database designs and stored procedures...