Strictly for what it's worth:  I program in the "paranoid" style.  That is, trust no inputs, trust no database contents, trust no one, trust nothing.  As a result, my procedures...

Should you be testing for a returned NULL from the function?

You can simulate global variables by declaring a global cursor that will be visible to all processes under the purview of your report.  You can then test the existence of...

You can use a CROSS JOIN on the table for which you want all rows returned.

If you're restoring from backups, you will be overwriting all database objects in the development database.  You'll need to keep any dev table definition changes, procedures, functions, etc. that you...

> You have no idea

Yes, I do. 

My two cents:  It's relative to a lot of things, including whether your DBMS is busy busy busy, or whether it sits there bored all day like the Maytag repairman. ...

  /*

  ||=======================================================

  || No warranties.  Use at own risk.  This is intended to

  || help; if you find it unhelpful, please discard...

  ||

  || The @filename variable...

SELECT IDENTITY (INT, 1, 1) seq, first_name INTO #cust2 FROM customers

SELECT * FROM #cust2 ORDER BY seq

Not efficient, but effective.

Maybe we've been dealing with the wrong vendors.

From what I've been seeing in recent years, the industry trend is moving away from using stored procedures.  This is not necessarily due to simple ignorance on how stored procedures...

Sorry, I missed the comment where you specified you weren't using the default port setting.  No experience, there.

> If you're a public corp I'm sure it would violate Sarbanes Oxley standards.

I don't even know what Sore Ben's Oxnard is, if it isn't a town on the...

I'm surprised this one didn't work for you; it works fine for me:

OSQL -Usqluser -Ppassword -Sip

You shouldn't need the port.

Can you ping the IP?

Let's assume all you need is a test area, with current database structures and a reasonably fresh data snapshot.  If this assumption is wrong -- if you need up to the minute...