TravisDBA (10/30/2012)

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Agreed, there ARE no guarantees in anything in life. It's mostly a roll of the dice anyway. The only thing you can do in the meantime, as you say,...

There are a couple of factors that can make varchar take more space than char of the same length. First is very short strings in a small column. ...

Being competent and getting along well with others are the best bets for job security, and for getting a new job fast if the old one goes away.

However, I have...

If it doesn't work, can you set up a VM on the laptop with a prior version of Windows on the VM? Kind of the ultime in backwards compatibility.

It has to be an "integer value", but does it have to be an "integer datatype"?

A varchar(22) can hold things like "1234567890123456789012". Looks like a number, is a number...

Cool biz. That's a good first step towards determining if consolidation makes sense.

britinusa (10/25/2012)

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Thanks for your fast response.

The reason we're doing this is simple.

In order to upgrade our db environment, using clustering, mirroring or whatever methods we choose ......

Use a cursor for that. It's one of the few things they're actually good for.

Lee Crain (10/26/2012)

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I forgot to mention the job description I recently saw for a full-time DBA that said the applicant would have to provide their own laptop.

If this trend continues,...

I've found Confio Ignite (free version here: http://www.ignitefree.com/) very useful for benchmarking database servers....

YSLGuru (10/24/2012)

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Thanks for all the replies. In case it make a doifference heres the tables DDL . Its a very simple table.

The thing is a queue...

YSLGuru (10/26/2012)

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I just went to test out the ProofOfConcept UDf you...

Excellent! Glad I could help.

Honestly, I'm used to using OpenRowset's Bulk option to pull XML files into an XML column in a single step. I haven't used OpenXML in years.

Once the XML is...

Yes. ...