99% of the time I use ISNULL.  It does what it says on the tin.

COALESCE is useful when you have to have some form of construct that is IF @a...

Depends on their caffeine intake

Seriously though, there are so many factors that determine how much administrative work needs to be done that it...

There are certain coding jobs that are the IT equivalent of cleaning the loo.

Dealing with NULLs, dates and default values etc.

If you can take this away from your developers and...

If you are absolutely positive that the records that you are about to delete don't have an related records in other tables then, as part of the delete process, try...

When you say that two table reference your 10 million row table, do you mean that there is a logical relationship or a physical i.e. foreign key constraints enforcing the...

I take it that you checked the client's source data?

Oooh the quandary.  Should I give the answer that the question wants or the actual answer received.

It's like being at college again where you give the answer your lecturer wants to...

Actually I would approach your problem from a completely different angle.

There are out-of-the-box e-commerce solutions out there and I would simply choose the one that is nearest your requirements.

They are...

The enterprise edition is one hell of a lot of money for......not really that much unless you are into major league stuff.

I would work out precisely what it is that...

I tend to follow the practice that if the table is in the middle of a query then I need a single unique field to act as a primary key.

If...

My understanding is that, as a transaction log is a sequential file writing into it doesn't cause performance issues.

That said I can see performance issues arising in the following areas.

• Disk...

Good Lord!!!!!!!

Well, make sure your first statement in the procedure is SET NOCOUNT ON, which should speed the thing up.

I would definitely break this...

If you are mixing and matching DDL with DML then you are almost certain to get recompiles.

The way that I would approach the problem is to break out the proc...

Could you be a bit more specific?

Do you mean the reporting services reports, error reports, results for QA etc?

I found that the best way of comparing text execution plans was to export them into text files then import them into source safe and use the compare function.

Crude I...