Some life's observations from an old fart

• No organisation shrinks to greatness!
• But it doesn't stop them trying
• Layoffs get exponentially scarier when you breach 40
• Pay peanuts, get monkeys
• If you work for a...

After a stiff expresso I sorted it.

Table structure was loosely

• ProductId
• DateFrom
• DateTo
• Price

Ages were produced by a table function returning a single column of ages.

What I wanted was to bring back all products...

If you have 6 instances spread across 2 nodes (making 6 virtual and 12 real) then you need to apply the service pack to your 6 instances.

SP4 is cluster aware...

My experience of training has been varied.

The best one was when the official trainer had called in sick and a emergency contractor had to be called in. He taught...

A person who does a good job makes it look easy. If it looks easy then it looks as if anyone could do it.

Do you have AWE enabled?

If so then you need to install the 2040 hot fix as well as SP4 (build 2039).

Each instance needs a separate install of the service pack.

SP4...

I have a friend who was slightly worried about where we left our cars when we went to a rock concert.

You don't have your works lap top in the boot...

As far as I can tell the advantages of XML are:

• It can get through port 80 in a firewall without scaring network admins
• It is geek readable so where the originator...

I don't believe that it is possible directly.

I have used an INSTEAD OF trigger on a view to achieve something similar but to be honest the simplest way is with...

So Job has a dependency on the Person existing before it can be entered?

Wrap it up in a transaction and have separate INSERT statements.

Well do the tables have the same structure, or does the retrieved information have the same structure?

Can you make your SELECT statements so that they do return same structured recordsets?

You...

I would be tempted to have a category table with:

• CategoryId
• ParentCategoryId
• CategoryName
• ...etc

This means that your category table becomes an extensible tree so when when a marketing type decides they want sub-sub-sub-sub categories...

It has been a while since I did old fashioned ASP but there was a NextRecordSet method on a RecordSet object.

FirstRs.Open "YourProc"

Set SecondRs = FirstRs.NextRecordset

I tend to have the SA as the explicit dbo user. It is the one login that is common across all servers.

You also have the db_owner role which multiple...

We have something called the data protection act in the UK which is a toothless attempt to block this sort of thing.

Why toothless? Because the government decided to allow...