Not knowing your friend, the company, or the interview, it'd be impossible to say why. Usually, it's because the people doing the interview thought that someone else was more qualified...

Well, if you're lazy you can even get around that:

INSERT INTO dbo.MyTable DEFAULT VALUES

GO 42

I suspect that's not what was meant. I'd be curious if there was a method too.

Yep. Works. Thanks.

Actually, no, I hadn't thought of that, but since our internally developed applications are never allowed to work under a security model that would provide them with DDL, it's not...

The fact that copying everything to a new database resulted in a working query strongly points out that something on the old database was different.

Yeah, that's part of our best practices check list too.

The only suggestion I can make is to assume that every problem has a set based solution up front. Then work on finding it. RBAR becomes a crutch. You just...

Seriously, why would physical column order matter? You can always get the columns out in any order that you want through views, procedures and functions.

My own experience and what I've been able to find, there isn't any way to directly access the reports themselves. They're not stored as .rdl files, which is what you'd...

It's brain candy, but tasty, John Birmingham's Final Impact. It's the third book in a trilogy (I truly hate that phrase, but they must be some kind of marketing thing,...

Excellent. Thanks. I'll work it in (if I still do it).

I finally got around to testing some more. I created three copies of an XML structure with almost identical data (I changed some of the key values between the three...

I'm not terribly up on the service broker, but a query is a query. If you've got the same query executing on both databases and everything else is equal, you'll...

Size is absolutely a major factor in determining experience. In addition to what Steve mentioned about backups, how you seperate out file storage, indexes, DBCC checks, data loads, reporting, statistics,...

The plan is showing missing statistics on columns. Are you sure auto-update & auto-create statistics are set to on in the bad database?

To get two different plans, something is not...