You're an evil man. I like it. Thanks for sharing the secret.

Steve,

Your response was a giant disapointment. You didn't tell us what ch*** is? What's up with that. Huge let down. I'm surprised they let you post here.

May be so, but to be honest, one could argue that artificial keys over natural keys is simply a personal opinion, albeit one a bit more applicable to the subject...

I found the article interesting and entertaining. The amount of vitriol it's generated is pretty surprising considering how mild the article was overall.

One comment about interviews from the interviewer side....

Even though you're running through Query Analyzer, I'll bet you're connecting through ODBC instead of through a native connection. Take a look in Control Panel at the ODBC settings. Either...

Everything everyone else said, plus, you can split off storage of text columns into a seperate file to keep maintenance of the text information seperate from the rest of your...

Thanks for the info. What types of maintenance headaches did you run into specifically? Disk space is kind of hard to argue, it being so cheap these days, but other...

I ran a search on the MS site and it looks like you may be behind on a service pack or two.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/825197

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;330307

It kind of depends on what you need. I'm pretty lucky at my company and we've got both Embarcadero DBArtisan and Quest Central. For object management, generating scripts, that sort...

Pretty straight-forward. ODBC has a query timeout setting. You've got options. Set the timeout higher. Tune the queries you're running so that they're faster. Verify the indexing strategy is good...

Good news. You've got an index allocation error. Easiest kind to fix. Drop the index and recreate it. Make sure you've got the recreate script handy prior to dropping of...

One thing not mentioned, is there a difference in parameters being passed by the various users? Are the first three calling proc A and passing in a parameter that returns...

While there are exceptions, the general rule would be to use a join against either a table or a derived table. It's almost always going to be faster becuase of...

I also can't tell you what caused it, but I ran into the same issue. I ran change owner proc against it to set the owner to a user that...

You're going to have to, minimum, set the traceflag 1204 to on. That will spit a bunch of information into your sql error log file that you can use to...