Absolutely true.

You also might want to look at having simply an Address table with a join table to associate addresses to contacts. That way when you get a married couple...

The first four of those columns you're talking about are there for auditing purposes and shouldn't have anything to do with relational integrity. The last column, the guid, I'm assuming...

Since you're not, in any way relating the data between these tables, an odd thing, you could do something like this:

SELECT 'TableA' AS TableName

,Cola AS FirstColumn

FROM dbo.TableA

UNION ALL

SELECT 'TableB' AS...

If you have to use dynamic sql, be sure to look up & understand sp_executesql as the preferred method of calling it rather than using exec 'somestring'

I'd have to go all the way to "stupid practices." If I was feeling kind, I might call it "ignorant practices." If I wasn't feeling kind, it'd be "f'ing stupid...

I find that I'm with the you need both an artificial key and a natural key camp. Usually, but not always, the artificial key is an identity. However, I also...

tymberwyld (2/10/2008)

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Grant Fritchey (2/7/2008)

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Nope. The one issue that we've had, and believe me the developers have howled, is that they can not simply add procedures (or drop them either). They...

Internal to SQL Server, they peform almost identically. The main difference is that OPENXML has to instantiate an XML parser that chews up a ton of memory outside of SQL...

In my opinion, this would not be a primary counter for checking performance. I'd use it once I've already identified range scans as an issue because of excessive waits or...

Are you looking for an Islands and Gaps solution?

This is from Itzik Ben-Gan's Inside TSQL Querying and identifies missing values

SELECT cur+1 AS start_range, nxt-1 AS end_range

FROM (SELECT col1 AS cur,

...

My XQuery knowledge is unfortunately new and grossly incomplete, but from what I do know, I don't think it's possible. XPath queries are a way of navigating the XML to...

1. Logical reads are all reads, physical from the disc as well as from memory. To determine physical reads as seperate from cache reads, you need to get performance monitor...

And, check your connection settings. See if the TSQL connection & the ADO connection are the same.

Does your table variable have a primary key and is that used to join to the other tables? If not, that's going to be a performance problem right there since...

I just remembered. There's this great book by Craig Mullins called Database Administration. It doesn't dwell on technology, but goes over general concepts quite well. I'd recommend that one too.