Now that's sweet. I had not known of this one prior to today. Thanks for posting it.

Nice choice. Beats a cursor in most situations.

Crud I hate that. My first response went into the ether and my second got posted so I look like a schmuck. Sorry about that. What I said was:

Generating objects...

Oops, should have added, SMO means SQL Management Objects. It's in the BOL, including decent (if not good) references & samples.

Based on what you're suggesting, you might want to look at doing a little SMO programming. You can quite simply generate a CREATE script for various objects from there.

We usually run this once a week on production servers:

sp_cycle_errorlog

We generally only keep the four weeks around. If you want to archive them after you cycle them,...

In general, you don't want to. TSQL is set based and works best when you keep that in mind.

For example, where I work, we will usually write a pair...

Thinking about it, that's a somewhat inadequate answer I gave.

Referring to Ambler's book on refactoring, of course you want to first add the new columns. Then you have a decision...

I'm not sure I agree on this one. My manager came out of sales & has few technical skills but he's doing a pretty good job managing the team. His...

If I were going to refactor this, I'd leave the existing column in place as a calculated column and then split the actual data storage into two other columns. My...

Good article. Interesting points. I've been at both extremes of the scale at large & small companies. Heck, I even went through the management change at a large company where...

You mean something like this?

SELECT DATEPART(month,t.SalesDate) AS Month,SUM(t.SalesQuantity),SUM(t.SalesAmt)

FROM tmpsalestarget t

GROUP BY DATEPART(month,t.SalesDate)

ORDER BY Month

Or are you trying to get them by day (1-31)?

Retire? What the heck is that?

I don't know that I can "retire" from being a geek. Even if I stop earning a living working with computers, I'll still be doing...

I have to agree. I'm stuck between option 2 & 3 (with occasional forays into 4). Since defaults aren't readily visible to the developers working on stored procs and since...

Neil Armstrong. I watched him walk on the Moon when I was 6 and it made me crazy for science (and science fiction). I tried to follow in his foot...