It's pretty straightforward. On the other hand, I've been using it for years, so my perspective may be skewed.

Try it out, and if you run into questions you can...

Roy Ernest (4/12/2010)

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I am back from my vacation... And I am not even going to bother trying to catch up with thread... It will take the next two weeks to...

Litespeed, and RedGate's SQL Backup both do better compression than SQL 2008 does on its own, in most situations.

Tom Garth (4/12/2010)

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James Stover (4/12/2010)

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I'm a fan of log shipping. It's a hardened bit of technology that works very well.

Having said that, isn't it time to improve on the file-based...

Run a trace of the current server, then play that trace back. That's often the best way to test.

You can either hard-code the variations into your queries (easy to do but a bad idea), or you can build a table saying which categories belong to which files, and...

I'm pretty sure he was trying to add to the humor.

The OR clause is probably making it do a table scan (clustered index scan), instead of using individual indexes that work in the separate queries.

What you can do, if you...

Another option would be to copy the images you need into a parallel table, then swap the table names and drop the old table. Use a backup of the...

Then you've lost a week's data. There's no way to recover from...

Gift Peddie (4/8/2010)

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GSquared (4/8/2010)

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Was a response to Gift's implicit "nolo contendre"....

The first one is doing the same thing. The variable isn't null because of the select returning a null, it's null because it has never been assigned a value....

There are a few RedGate tools I find very useful, with the highest use going to SQL Prompt and SQL Refactor. Even those are "nice", not "essential", though.

I can...

I wouldn't use an inner join on the tables. I'd use a full outer join.

Since this is a join from one year to the next, what happens if one...

chandrasekaran.ganapathy (4/8/2010)

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Nice explanation. But I dint get how it is related to the database. Are you meant that if i can pull the data where index no is 3 I...