Prefixing procs with "sp_" causes a small but definite performance reduction. It also means that, if there's a proc in master with the same name, you can end up...

Steve Jones - Editor (10/21/2009)

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I did reply that I thought he was being unprofessional, both in his posts, as well as his approach to the job. I asked him to...

Silverfox (10/21/2009)

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GSquared (10/21/2009)

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Grant Fritchey (10/20/2009)

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No accountants here either... Nurses, Receptionists, Sales people... those I've seen try to be DBA's. Nurses weren't so bad, neither were the receptionists... keep the sales...

jcrawf02 (10/21/2009)

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Isn't that just...

Well, that certainly gives a good interview question to ask. We've evolved it to, "You have a database with a corrupted or lost page, and the backup chain is broken...

In the case of data that doesn't change, that's better off in a read-only database or read-only file. SQL Server won't even attempt to take locks on read-only data,...

irozenberg (10/18/2009)

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Steve,

Thank you for your article. I would like to add my 2 cents:

- xml data-type should be and must be strongly-typed (i.e. client has to pass not just...

Grant Fritchey (10/20/2009)

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No accountants here either... Nurses, Receptionists, Sales people... those I've seen try to be DBA's. Nurses weren't so bad, neither were the receptionists... keep the sales people away...

The main reason that the Not In version is slow is almost certainly that it's concatenating columns in the Where clause. That kind of thing almost always results in...

Change this part:

EXEC SP_EXECUTESQL

@SQL,

@InsertID OUTPUT

to:

EXEC SP_EXECUTESQL

@sql,

...

And you might be shocked by how many people who call themselves DBAs or who even have jobs as DBAs can't answer that question. I've met dozens.

Reboot when you have to, never otherwise.

Rebooting forces SQL Server to rebuild all execution plans. It can take a smoothly running server and slow it down for a day...

You're welcome.

You can get pretty fancy with it pretty easily. It's easy to add column headers (just add them as the top row of the grid when you add...

Since rows in a relational database don't have a definite order, you'll need to do this in preprocessing.

I've seen systems that use .NET code to step through the text file...

No way I know of to do that in 2005. Might be able to use the resource governor in 2008 for that, not sure.