Thinking about Henry Ford's quote reminded me of the last model Ford Escort. Ford asked its customers what they wanted and out came something that showed the world that...

Thanks,

The IBM list gave a good jump start. It's just a shame that there isn't an inbuilt function that returns a table of these words.

It would be great to...

If you denormalise the database where data it maintained you add to the cost of data maintenance tasks and you run the increased risk of being hit by bugs due...

I've done quite a bit of testing of NEWID() and randomness and it is a very effective random number generator.

As the GUID comprises of blocks of hexadecimal these blocks can...

As with all things DBA related it depends.

If you have a very large product set then adding in an extra column for the Top 'n' products wastes storage though in...

Jeff, there is a short and illuminating article on http://www.infoq.com http://www.infoq.com/vendorcontent/show.action?vcr=847 regarding technical debt in agile projects that echoes what you say.

Basically a project team is given a fixed immutable...

Perhaps someone could confirm this for me but on the subject of right-sizing datatypes I gather that shrinking fixed length datatypes after creation makes a metadata change but not a...

I think I would still stick with the queue table for the reasons mentioned earlier.

My...

I didn't use a filtered or nonclustered index on the base table for two reasons.

1. The original solution was on SQL2000.

2. The main table had incredibly heavy read activity on...

If you look throught he source of the built in system stored procs you will see quite a few cases of IF(SELECT COUNT(*)...)>0

Try sp_helptext 'sp_helptext' for an example!

When I worked for McCann-Erikson they classified people into 4 segments analogous to the part of a printed advert. It was exactly the same thing as the Introvert/Extrovert Vs...

Has anyone noticed that the old system stored procs are not that efficient?

IF(SELECT COUNT(*) FROM ...) >0:w00t:

Cursors all over the place etc.

If you have separate instances then you can of course use sp_configure to specify a maximum amount of memory for each instance.

You can also specify which CPUs get used by...

Add memory to the physical box and set up virtual servers rather than separate instances.

Probably a daft question but you are running the proc in the correct database?