Very popular topic.  Start here:

https://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/introduction-to-indexes-part-2-%e2%80%93-the-clustered-index

I'd go through the entire series.  Gail's VERY good.

I think thre's a rather sizeable difference between associates informally sharing salary info, and a company that openly publishes/discloses all salaries.  In the first case  - since the company isn't...

If you don't use the union all you could change the actual output of the query (in which case UNION will not be equivalent...

This feels silly.  The fact that during design you make the best choice against imperfect data as to what will or will not change.  That said |I don't understand the...

Agreed that login name...

keep in mind that neither solution will deduplicate the value list.  So you will end up with a string listing 'red" 100 times, if 100 rows within a grouping point...

That works.  But, you may see additional errors appear when running the app. The app may have something that tries to modify the database(s), such as shrinking(!) or something...

For a highly selective and sensitive database, something  like AIDS patients or voter records, address should be protected. Not only can it be used in conjunction...

For a highly selective and sensitive database, something  like AIDS patients or voter records, address should be protected. Not only can it be used in conjunction with other...

While it does depend, in general I'd think that while the DBA might be not responsible for those design items, they likely will be held accountable for them.

In short while...

I have a suggestion for you Jeff. Your company may bill by the quarter hour, but that doesn't mean that you have to enter your time that way. Tell...

Well if not reading the manual is reason to remove people's ability to code, then there are a LOT of developers to fire out there.  As with many other disciplines...

• This reply was modified 6 years, 6 months ago by Matt Miller (4).

I'd also take issue with the oversimplification that "SSIS only deals with the Microsoft stack".  there are a number of built-in connectors, and support for OLEDB connectors and other such...

Do you guys run EVERYTHING that goes into production through QA/UAT, or do you trust some users if they have a proven track record of high scores, and...

The except syntax direct compares matching sets of columns.  That said - the output of the EXCEPT is a recordset, so you could make it a subquery then join back...