This is not a flame, but I have some quibbles with Joe's encyclopedic response

 f) Nested query expressions follow the usual scoping rules you would expect from a block...

I definately you should have some naming standards, just not Hungarian.

For example, we had a manager who heard about the concept of metadata and completely misunderstood it, but soon all...

Ditto to keeping Hungarian out of databases.  I'm a firm believer in using it in code, but the only trace of it I use in databases is a 'vw' prefix...

Vladan and Bob have a great solution, unless:

The listing ID's are not unique

You want to use more complicated criteria to choose the best match

You have very large tables

The solution I...

You may be thinking of correlated subqueries that cause extra I/O.  This form of subquery is merely syntax, it lets you create computed fields and then refer to those fields...

You should certainly learn how to set up alerts for replication and other events, that is free and very effective.

I have to monitor four remote SQL Servers while getting other...

select 1 as ord, player as player, sum(pts), str(sum(rebs),6,0) from sum_players where tm = #tm#

union

select 2 as ord, 'Total' as player, sum(pts), str(sum(rebs),6,0) from sum_team where tm = #tm#

union

select 3 as...

I have a similar task, where I'm matching two lists and want the best matches but can have only one unique match for an item from either list.  You don't...

AGS gave you the right answer, I don't care how big your query is.

All the field names you use in the field list and other clauses (WHERE, ORDER BY, etc)...

Using a large field for a clustered index does not have a significant impact unless the table has other indexes.

Creating a clustered index on a large field saves space initially,...

It's probably safe to assume that all the Amount and Comment columns are distinct, so SELECT DISTINCT would not affect the row count.

The only way to "get around" it is...

When you have multiple joins, the resulting record count will be the product of all the duplicates in all tables.

For instance if you have a central table with joins to...

I'm still prejudiced against the construction "WHERE field = value OR field IS NULL".  My feeling is you want to filter the rows before the join, not after (although the...

You might want to put the reformatting in a view, a transformation in the DTS package, or a computed column in the table, rather than updating the table.  This way it applies to data...

If any of the names might be NULL, you need to do it this way:

declare @names varchar(500)

select @names = ''

select @names = @names + ISNULL(',' + fname, '') from Users

select...