I can't remember where the quote comes from but it was along the lines of "An organism that ceases to explore its environment is in decline and is ultimately doomed"....

It would be nice if there was a simple document that listed all the features that are going to be deprecated and all those that are to be replaced. It...

I was asked to review a performance issue on a database and came to the conclussion that a covering index would offer a massive boost in performance. I tried...

I would get rid of the SELECT *.

I've had problems when the underlying table structure changed but the stored proc did not pick up the changes.

I would also switch to...

If you are doing searches and retrievals that use all the fields in index 2 then stick with index 2.

Remember an index will be ignored if the query optimiser thinks...

How often does the data warehouse get populated?

If it is a periodic load then having the database in simple recovery mode is OK. When you do a data load...

CHAR is fixed length where as VARCHAR is variable length so VARCHAR should use less space than CHAR. The only caveat is that VARCHAR fields need to store something...

Chris, it is obsolete.

When I built the original solution I used temporary tables however I found that views worked just as well and the temporary tables weren't needed.

The error is...

Depends on your permissions but you can do DROP db.dbo.view just as you can do SELECT * FROM db.dbo.view

No, only one table at a time can have INDENTITY_INSERT ON.

What exactly are you trying to do?

Run the trace without using the profiler. The profiler GUI slaughters performance.

Where separation in 'n' tier applications CLR functions have little use because each component is a specialised resource.

Where the SQL Server is more of a one-stop-shop then the CLR functions...

In the short term I would run a trace.

Other ways are to use the following to write to the Windows event log.

RAISERROR('Procedure name xxxxxx ran',10,1) WITH LOG,NOWAIT

You can have the...

This a question to which the answer is "it depends".

The only way of telling is by using DBCC SHOWCONTIG to see how fragmented the tables are.

If you have tables on...

I learnt to play the piano at the age of 5 and one of the first things they teach is how to hold your hands and wrists.

So far I have...