Sorry Jon, but it is a common use case in a sales order system.

You are right that the example was contrived. I did say in the article that it...

I use SET NOCOUNT ON wherever possible. There seems little point gain in stored procedures only to lose in triggers.

Back in time of ADO (NOT .Net) the returned message sometimes was treated as a Recordset...

I didn't come across this problem with ADO but at one place I worked they...

It doesn't matter what the system is there will always be someone who tries (and suceeds) to crack it.

In the UK there is a government database that has been set...

I have seen cursors out-perform a non-cursor method of looping through records.

The key is knowing exactly when a cursor is necessary or alternatively, when some nifty set based SQL will...

I am wary of anything that involves string manipulation because strings are immutable.

If you do something that says @YourString = @YourString + 'Some text' then what really happens is that

@YourString...

I worked on government sites that required Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi etc.

The problem with those languages is that there is NO standard font for them and therefore you are at...

I think the important thing is not what the standard is but the fact that there is a standard.

Company A may have a totally different standard than Company B but...

I have come across a scenario where I have to move a table from an application specific database to a database that is shared by all applications.

Given that it is...

I would vote for Innovasys DocumentX and Apex SQL Doc as documentation tools.

OK I am particularly interested in developing CLR functions, aggregates and procedures.

Does anyone know of a download that would provide the datatypes or is there a general work around...

I think censorship is OK provided it correctly identifies work related sites.

The problem comes in identifying those legitemate work related sites.

After shrinking the log look up ALTER DATABASE MODFIY FILE in Books on Line.

Firstly back up the transaction log.

Next run sp_helpdb 'YourDatabaseName'

Note the name of the log device

now run DBCC SHRINKFILE('TheLogFileName','Your desired size')

If the server is a linked server then SQLServer1.pubs.dbo.checkcontract should have worked.

You do have to tell SQL Server to create a linked server with the appropriate credentials though.