Almost as horrifying but just as funny, I did not personally witness but a co-worker did, a demo some developers where giving to our business people where a request was...

LOL I was able to remove some doubt from a doubting Thomas today.  He wanted to write a new scalar UDF, and I was able to easily show him the...

Yep, even my old books online from SQL Server 2008 listed it as being deprecated.  I find it funny how long some deprecated things actually hang on.  :satisfied:

I suppose you could use the older version, but there are 32 and 64 bit drivers available at the website I posted a link to.

The ACE OLEDB drivers are a part of the Microsoft Access Database Engine redistributable,  You can find that here:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=54920

I fall into the Generalist category of DBAs, meaning I'm involved with setup, security, and maintenance of the SQL Server instances, as well as assisting developers in tuning queries, doing...

Another way, which may not matter for NorthWind, but could be slightly more efficient for a bigger database, is to only test for EXISTS as opposed to doing a JOIN:

For scripts, the free SP_Blitz scripts from Brent Ozar's group provide a wealth of information for a DBA:
https://www.brentozar.com/first-aid/

If you ever are working on helping a...

so it looks like you are on RTM + MS15-058
https://buildnumbers.wordpress.com/sqlserver/

to answer your question we'd probably need to know some more detail about what type of...