I think the whole "can be done cheaper in a low cost country" is a case of perception vs reality. The problem comes when it is the perception of...

Solomon Rutzky (12/29/2010)

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The only issue I have is with your statement that "median" is not a good case for a CLR aggregate as it might "require a substantial portion of...

If I work from home I eliminate a 2 hour round trip commute. This means I can either start earlier or have a lie in. When I finish...

On the subject of the expensive sort in the execution plan I had a note back from Bob Beauchamp saying that there is an internal stream aggregator operation that causes...

One point I forgot to mention was a data warehouse appliance is a self contained unit so you won't be cannibalizing your existing storage and IO. There is obviously...

I thought SWITCH only worked in Enterprise Edition?

If you have...

In the rare cases when I've felt the need for RBAR I've found that in some cases cursors are faster than WHILE loops but only when I don't have to...

IBM has acquired Neteeza.

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/32955.wss

I wrote up my thoughts on MPP appliances earlier this year http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/MPP/70845/.

They are not a marketing hype thing. Green plum has been bought by EMC, Neteeza has been bought...

Another easy mistake to make is to put a clustered index on the view that conflicts with the clustered index in the base tables. I now hold the world...

grahamc (11/15/2010)

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Well one argument (not seen in this thread yet) for the case of using NULL values is the introduction of SPARSE columns. This link discusses the space savings based...

There are subtle differences between the different RDBMS's that mean chop and change may not be as cheap as it should be.

You could be faced with quite a bit more...

I've been trying to get people out of the habit of using != but they're just not buying my "<> is more readable". Do you have another reason to...

If you have to build application code to scrub nulls then surely it would have been better not to have them in the first place. Surely allowing nulls just...

WHERE s.column >'' will be marginally more efficient than WHERE s.column<>''

Nulls are sometime necessary, for example if I have a DrivingConvictions table in a car insurance database I might have

DriverID

OffenceCode

PenaltyPoints

IllegalSubstanceReading

If...