One guy we interviewed had a rant on his blog complaining that interviewers didn't read his blog! Boy did we have some fun with that one!

Is now the time...

The problem seems to be that the underlying objects for the query are system views.

If you take an exact copy of sp_spaceused and create your own copy in the master...

One thing that puzzles me about Azure is that fundamentally, under the hood, it is SQL Server. The traditional bits that are not exposed to cloud subscribers still have...

the original article was written using SQL2005 but there appears to be subtle differences in SQL2008.

I'll have a look into it ASAP.

Rutulian (8/12/2011)

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One of the more fun interviews I have had:

You are standing on the bank of the Thames.

How can you find out the flow rate, assuming the internet doesn't exist?

(10...

Thanks for the feedback. I haven't tried it with a linked server query.

Where possible I base my articles and experiments on the sample databases Adventureworks, Northwind or Pubs simply...

That's unfortunate actually. I now live in the south part of America and have been trying very hard to not pick up this southern drawl. It's horrible.

"I've got...

Not yet but close.

My experience, and I've had a lot of it, is similar to your own.

I have seen it work in an e-commerce site where there was a large...

So a bit value is 1 or 0

A date is 20110728

A Money value is 65000

If money is a whole value then why not use an INT?

If money is a decimal...

What proportion of reads do you have to writes?

Can you subdivide what you do along a product line basis?

Can you break your database out into separate DBs for customers, products...

The InnoDB engine has a default page size of 16K which is global to the engine.

The MySQL web site says you can recompile the code to anything between 4K and...

If you accept the premise that your surrogate keys are going to be BIGINT values then you could try the following

The right most 6 characters are just a sequential number

The...

Any views or procs that reference objects in your CONFIG database?

anything that uses cross database ownership chaining?

What exactly are you trying to achieve?

Are you attempting to come up with some sort of key generator?

Whereas a uniqueidentifier is 16 bytes a bigint is 8 but random keys...

This would be on my list of things to avoid.

The nearest I've seen to a "safe" solution was where the tables for which these actions were allowed were stored in...