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...

This is on my list of "stupid things no-one in their right mind would try" and I apologise to any DBA for revealing how you do this.

EXEC sp_addlinkedserver 'ExcelSource',

...

BASIC = bodgers and simpletons incomprehensible cobblers.

Yes, though some of the newer SQL2008 options won't appear in the object browser tree.

With clustering you have 2 or more physical SQL Servers accessing a shared disk but appearing as one. In the event of one server being unavailable the cluster will...

At a guess you are using NVARCHAR and NCHAR rather than VARCHAR and CHAR fields.

the N... data type fields take twice the space of the VARCHAR/CHAR equivalents.

There is an added...