In 2005, you can accomplish much...

Ah. I don't have any SQL 7 instances. That would explain why I'm not familiar with those.

Heck, even if you fail the test, so long as you don't tie too much of your ego into passing, you can probably learn from it.

The worst that could happen...

I worked with a guy who really, really, really felt that same way. To him, the database itself was a necessary evil, and should be...

I just looked at every server I've got. I looked at all of them in Management Studio, and also looked at the 2000 ones in Enterprise Manager. All...

I would rebuild the solution to take better advatage of SQL set-based logic. I'd dump all of the feed data into a separate table from the main table, then...

I would cluster the index on Zip, disable the other two indexes during the import and re-enable them after, and definitely would not use bulk logging on something that size....

Ross McMicken (6/30/2008)

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I would love to improve the vendor package I support, but management won't let me unless I can convince the vendor to make the change. Which happens occasionally....

You're allowed to keep a copy of the software installed on a separate server if it's being used as a "cold standby", so that should be fine.

Unless there is a specific reason otherwise, you don't need to run this kind of thing as dynamic SQL.

Use a string parser (there are some on the Scripts page of...

Look at IsNull in Books Online. That'll give you the data on how to turn Null into something else.

Not sure what you mean by the red squiggly on instances, and I think SQL Server Agent always has a clock on the icon (because it's essentially a scheduling tool)....

The reason for the problem with the original query is that it's actually two separate queries that run separately. First, it does an update of all rows. Then...

Can you use Replace to get rid of them?

Try casting both to decimal(4,3).