I find maintenance plan tasks to be a good stopgap till you can get something "real" in place. They're very, very useful for new/accidental/incidental DBAs, but too limited compared...

Ferguson (2/8/2011)

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Jack Corbett (2/8/2011)

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I agree that this is a much better posting, albeit one I am not qualified for.

I think that you should almost always include "or equivalent experience" when...

On the flow from source to destination (the arrow in the package designer), you can right-click and set a data view on the state of the data at that point....

Won't get you what you need on this point, so far as I know.

Makes sense.

I interviewed at a company once, where they tested their backup generator every month. And that used up all the fuel in it, so when they actually needed...

Commented-comments are an edge case and...

The easiest way to do it is to check a range.

Where CreatedOn >= '2011-02-03' and CreatedOn < '2011-02-04'

There are other ways to do it, but this one almost always works...

Check out sys.columns.

You'll want to set up a script, using dynamic SQL, that will step through all databases on a server and do a basic health-checkup. Then copy that and a...

There are edge cases where Lowell's solution will return a false positive. For example, a commented-out-end-comment.

/* This comment has been

--*/modified

by devs who weren't paying attention*/

Reversing the sequence on...

I think the latest version of the job posting is clear enough and presented well enough.

Other than the degree requirement, it's one I would apply for if I were looking....

That kind of complex pattern matching is going to be best done through regex functions. That means CLR, since that's MUCH better at regex than T-SQL.

Once you've built the...

Here's an article on hierarchies. It includes a link to Joe's data on the subject (which is must-read for any DBA).

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/T-SQL/65540/

An inline sub-query in the Select clause would work just as well as an explicit join, probably. Has the advantage/liability that it will give an error if there are...

A maintenance plan can have a "clean up history" step. That's the most usual cause of data in that table going away. Check the scheduled jobs in SQL...