I guess I'm confused by the problem. When I ran the test as presented I got the error you described, but I got the same error even when I commented...

I think you're correct on my errors in the article. Thanks for the input. I'm not sure if Steve will let me do an update, but I'll check.

I suspect it's...

What about scans & I/O? Are they on identical servers? What about weirder stuff like tempdb usage or log backups or other processes causing locks, etc.

Still, the difference between...

I experimented and came up with this:

USE

tempdb;

IF EXISTS (SELECT *...

The only answer I have for you is the one that I'm dealing with at this company. They want the "code" tables to be the same across all applications and...

Allow me to say right up front, I don't like this standard. I inherited it. I fought against it. I lost.

We name our simple lookup tables 'C_WhatEver' and the complicated...

By and large I've stayed away from XML in the database for all the reasons that most people here can list. I have found that XML can play a part...

Two single quotes inside of single quotes. So if it's part of a string, it looks like this:

'There''s a single quote'

If you were just inserting a quote:

''''

Because:

''

Is an empty string.

 You're going to have to do a lot more work in order to convert from that form of string.

One problem that I...