I couldn't think of a good use for FIRST and LAST even when I was using Access.  If I needed such functions then I was almost certainly looping through records...

Never occurred to me that these were (mis)managers. 

Would you say that Dilbert was the rantings of a disgruntled employee?

Any similarities between persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

Problems don't just vanish.  I suspect that a.n.other process is the true cause of the problem this will come back to haunt you.

I would build up a string message in...

Float and Real are for approximate values only.

How realistic is your '9999999999999999999999998' figure?

Its when they tell you to cut up old Christmas cards to save on toilet paper that you have to worry.

My eyes still water when I see a card with...

So, if you rebuild and index with a low fill factor you get lots of pages with lots of room in them and therefore more space to insert records before...

No, MIN returns the minimum value, FIRST returns the first occurence.

Of course, if MSSQLSERVER runs under a domain account you should be able to use the debugger within QA.

Open up the object browser in QA, right click on the proc...

Great thanks, I think the FILLFACTOR and PAD_INDEX are prime candidates for an article.

So a page split is expensive because it copies half the records from the last page into...

The thing to remember with security is who and what are you protecting the server from.

In our case SQLMail can only be used to send internal mail and can only...

I am still not 100% clear as to how to decide the FILL FACTOR.

My understanding was that if you have a high input rate into a table then the indices...

Do you allow mail to go into your SQL Server or are you simply pushing messages outwards?

Our network guy installed Outlook but configured the Exchange server so that only internal mail...

I work in a development environment where data is relatively small, even when we do data migration jobs.

This gives me the luxury of running DBCC DBREINDEX as part of the...

Check for locks.

It may be that you stored procedure requires a lock on an item that is already locked.

I take it that your publication includes the stored procedures, not just the tables?

The quickest way of reassigning pemissions is to assign permissions to a role then use TSQL Script...