If you have 3,000 or more tables then having a meaningful naming scheme for your tables becomes VERY important, otherwise your developers get lost in the mire.  This was one...

Its is great trying to maintain hundreds of tables when the tables have meaningless names.  Anyone care to guess what A35020 holds?

Don,

In your example the Id field is an IDENTITY field and therefore there is no way that EmployeeTypeId can return an entry for CompanyStatus or whatever.

If you are talking about...

I am still in the dark as to why my MUCK table with a single field primary key can break referential integrity.

If I've got a contacts table with an AgeBandId...

OK, who has the time to design, code and test a database that needs 300+ lookup tables within the time that management have been promised the finished application

I had an application where "best practice" described in this article would have resulted in around 300 lookup tables averaging 7 entries per table.

A single table with and id, type,...

CREATE TABLE Code (

  CodeID int IDENTITY(1,1)

  , CodeType int

  , Description varchar(255))

ALTER TABLE Code ADD CONSTRAINT PK_Code PRIMARY KEY (CodeID, CodeType)

I would put CodeID as the PRIMARY KEY and...

OK here is a provocative comment.

IT outsourcing is the fault of the existing IT departments.  Failure to communicate and integrate with their businesses has lead to them being viewed as...

My big beef about outsourcing is that there is a huge separation between the people requesting the system and the people delivering the system.

If you work within a company then...

I got quite enthusiastic about the ability to append group procs together, until I realised you can't explicitly drop a particular proc in a group.

Are you querying the SQL2K box from the SQL7 box or vice verse?

You will either have to add the the SQL7 box to the SQL2K box as a linked server...

I prefer to have the different functions in separate stored procedures so that it is immediately obvious to the programmer what the procedure is supposed to do.

usp_GetContacts = SELECT

usp_SetContacts =...

LIMIT is a bit more specialised than the nearest SQL equivalent which is the TOP predicate

SELECT TOP 20 C.Firstname, C.Surname

FROM Customers AS C

ORDER BY C.FirstName

There is also SET ROWCOUNT that...

I would add that in the UK salary rates are still down on what they were 4 years ago.

Outsourcing is more of a risk in the UK.  I put this...

Have you tried stepping through the stored procedure in SQL query analyser?

Right click on the offending procedure within the Object Browser and you will see "Debug" at the bottom of...