Or does 13097 really mean 1/30/1997?  If so, how do you distinguish 1/12/97 from 11/2/97?  Not enough info to give you a good answer on this.

If you're going to do it this way, I'd suggest the following structure to minimize locking:

CREATE PROCEDURE Get_New_ID

@Prefix varchar(2)

AS

begin tran

-- do the update to increment the...

I have a bunch of favorites but the latest one's that I find myself using are both by Kinky Friedman, musician, novellist, and soon to be Governor of Texas:

We're all...

How big is the database?

How are connections handled?  Are you using pooled connections from a web (or other) server or does each user make and terminate connections?  There's a fair amount...

Hmmm...

Could be any number of things.  How busy are the disks and how are the database files laid out?  It's possible that I/O is the bottleneck and redistributing the files...

You might want to check for NULL in @variable before you concatenate it with anything.  I think NULL concatenated with anything yields NULL.

I hesitate a little to send the following code, because I have to caveat it so heavilly.  It was built for Sybase, and it was never really finished, so there...

From our friends in Redmond:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;287737

the sqldmo answer.

Will the days always be 3 digits?  (0015 for January 1, 2005 as opposed to 15).  What happens in 2010?

Making some assumptions, this might be a place to start:

declare @x...

Depending on how large your coulumn is, you might create a table with all the numbers from 1 to your largest identity and then join the two tables, deleting the...

Looks like the autogrow increment may be running the disk out of space.  Check to see if you have enough room to do a 25% (or a 10%) growth on...

I, Robot.  The Asimov original story is better than the movie, but the questions are one's my grandkids will probably have to answer.  What is 'life' anyway?  And maybe 'if...

I have to agree with Steve on this.  The idea that everyone can just pull up stakes and go somewhere better is grossly oversimplifying the complexities of life.  In the...

How big is the database from which the backup was made?

I grew up in Cannonsburg, Kentucky, and I just got back from a vacation trip to the old homestead.  We had one 4-way stop in the middle of town, a...