I'll grant that the hotfix record of Microsoft has been less than stellar. Case in point: uPnP and RDP patches that blue screened systems and the latest memory leak patch...

I think Microsoft may actually be toeing the line on this one... It used to be okay to use *= or =* in the WHERE clause for OUTER JOIN, however,...

Do these DTS packages have connections to text files where the text files have more than 255 columns in a row?

K. Brian Kelley

http://www.truthsolutions.com/

Author: Start to Finish Guide to SQL Server...

Some of the issues are being answered by "Install MDAC 2.7 first manually" which isn't just the registry setting.

K. Brian Kelley

http://www.truthsolutions.com/

Author: Start to Finish Guide to SQL Server Performance...

Haven't seen a KB article on it, yet, but it is in the Microsoft public newsgroups.

HTML access is here:

http://www.microsoft.com/sql/community/newsgroups/default.asp

K. Brian Kelley

http://www.truthsolutions.com/

Author: Start to Finish Guide to SQL Server Performance...

This was the subject of a message by Russ on NTBugTraq. Basically exposing the vendors who are not ponying up support. When I called a couple of vendors I got...

Amen, brother. Those of us who are concerned with the security side of SQL Server wanted to apply MS02-039 when it rolled out but we had to go through the...

<rant>

The SP2 hotfix works... just a patch released after the hotfix had old files and if you let them overwrite, you lose the security patch. Great, right? The article on...

I'm not questioning what you've demonstrated in the scripts. What I am trying to make sure we're on the same page on is that the cross-database ownership chains don't have...

I agree with Steve on this one but if you want to try something...

One thing you have the option of trying is to revoke the SELECT rights against sysdatabases and...

A lot of people have been having problems with the MSDE service packs. We had problems here.

As far as scanning, start MSDE up and use SQL Retina from eEye,...

I'm not sure I follow you on this one:

quote:

---

As most

databases are created as dbo, and the owner is typically sa, then...

Congrats, Simon! Though I think you are more right than you give yourself credit for. I'm hoping to put together an article on cross-database ownership chaining...

Tim, the reason I didn't delve into cross-database ownership chains is because he's apparently calling the stored procedure using an account with privilege (since he's able to instantiate Word, Excel,...

Nit-picking a bit, but ad hoc queries can have cached execution plans that are re-used (see Chapter 15 of Inside SQL Server 2000). With that said, you eliminate a lot...