Steve Jones - SSC Editor (3/7/2016)

There's a...

Taxes :sick:

Theft

Pill

Agreed. Never. There's always something to automate or improve.

He changed the data type to allow extra space for the concatenation to occur. Try changing both VARBINARY(1000) to a BINARY(4) and run it to see the difference.

The way SQL treats NULLs is sometimes fun. Thanks.

Performance tuning is a pretty big topic. To boil it down to a set number of steps, I guess they would be something like this:

1. Measure performance.

2. Make an...

Boy, what a great editorial. It speaks to something I firmly believe in - automating the tasks that are boring, tedious or error-prone. Automating repetitive tasks frees up...

Nice catch on the implicit cast, Hugo.

Biker Dad, when you make this change, the impact on performance is going to be incredible. However, please don't discount Hugo's first suggestion....

Jeff Moden (3/5/2016)

Actually, I wonder if the question has been answered. 🙂

I wonder if it's a "security"...

Sorry, I forgot to address your other point. Yes, you could shrink the production database. However, you should first ask yourself why. It's the size it is...

I know this is reaching, but was there another process already shrinking the database on test?

In addition to what Hugo suggested, don't forget to check any synonyms for ones that refer to a three-part name. You could have some that refer to database A.

Like Phil said, with no code, it's impossible to say one way or...