What nerve did these nulls hit, that sop many people are spending so much time to develop and perfect so many solutions?

Yes, RBAR is...

Yes, you could select individual columns, UNION them, GROUP them (which would remove nulls), and pivot them back into four columns. That would be uglier than the RBAR example...

I found that when I am working from home, I work more hours than when I am in the office. And if I do it for several weeks, a...

This is ugly and it would kill performance on large rowsets, but it works:

DECLARE @hobby1 NVARCHAR(50),

@hobby2 NVARCHAR(50),

...

ad 1)

Yes and no: yes, I made it through a military bootcamp in 1965, but no, it was not one for DBAs. There were no DBAs back then. 🙂

ad...

Sorry, I forgot to say it explicitly, my "sabbatical" to learn Azure was fully paid.

(If I could forfeit the point I am getting for this clarification, I would. 🙂 )

Steve Jones - SSC Editor (7/5/2011)

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. . . they sometimes are referred to as a leave of absence, unpaid, and no guarantees that your job will be there. To date,...

Usually, but not always. Publicly traded companies often have a...

Let me point out another wrinkle: big international companies have international shareholders, and their opinion what is ethical and what is not, with whom to do business and with whom...

TravisDBA (7/2/2011)

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. . . I have never gotten the real answer from an employer during an interview as to why the prior DBA left the position until after I was...

"Try," as in that famous "Try not: do or do not. There is no try."

Unfortunatly, too many (new) managers just try.

My ratio of good to bad since 2003 is 7 : 2; fortunately, those bad ones were not too bad, and the good ones I turned into my friends.

djackson 22568 (7/1/2011)

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. . . I can say, a lot of companies are now having people come in and work without paying them. They sell it as "let's see...

I would try someting like this --

SELECT 1

WHERE 1 = CASE

WHEN @x = @y THEN 1

...