Great piece, Steve. My sole objection is your calling this "think time". I call it "dream time", and its whole purpose is to shut the thinking machine down, and allow...

As a Stephenson fanatic, I would have mentioned "The Baroque Cycle" too, but guessed that three 1000+ page volumes is a bit of a commitment. That said, I loved the...

Steve,

Since you're concentrating on geeky books, let me suggest two by my favourite s-f writer, Neal Stephenson:

Cryptonomicon - World War II seen as a war between four mathematicians, who all...

Excellent article, Steve. At almost 65, I have found myself a victim of ageism too, but recently managed to obtain a gig as a SQL/VBA developer. In the past month...

The first question I have is, Why do it in CLR rather than T-SQL? If you are simply trying to learn CLR programming, that's one thing. But if you just...

Thanks for the illumination. I have run into this problem several times (dev/qa/prod) and now I think I have a glimmer of how to solve this. Thanks!

Arthur

You described well the "how to" aspect of synonyms, but what I fail to grasp its the usefulness. Why would I want to create a synonym? What advantage is gained?...

A lot of the replies to Steve's original message tend to take the tack of blaming the people who came before us in the chaiin of development/evolution. I sense a...

Well said, BobW! You have concisely expressed my 25 years in this business.

Arthur

As for me, I am heavily on the side of thorough documentation, updated always before any revisions are undertaken. My view is that the logic is contained in the documentation,...

I agree completely. Prior to SQL 2005 and schemas, I switched to a convention that I think I invented which I called Hungarian post notation. Its purpose was to circumvent...

It would appear that you're correct about the correlation between coding and martial arts. I am yet another one -- ten years of Shotokan and two years of taikwan-do. I...

I totally agree with you, but I qualify my agreement with a measure of the team I'm on, in terms of maturity. Some people, I have learned the hard way,...

That small error aside, you have led the way. I rewrote your stuff into a table-udf which accepts the object type as a parameter and it works beautifully. I can...

I was just about to hit the same button, when I spotted your reply. If you want a proc to appear in every database you create (subsequent to adding it),...