I'm back where I was. I'd break it down into three tables, one to define the owner, one to define the competency and one to relate them to each other.

I trust Perry on the structural side of things like this. If he says you literally can't do it, you probably can't. I'm pretty much in the camp of I...

Generally, because of how SQL Server stores and retrieves data, it's a good idea on most tables to have a clustered index. Because of how clustered indexes are stored, it's...

If they're low on space, yeah, I'd turn on auto grow, or maybe just go ahead and give them some head room now if you have the disk space to...

Nice job figuring it out. And thanks for posting the solution so anyone else who finds the question knows what you did to solve it.

I agree with everyone else, make sure the backups are in place. I'd probably shut down & startup using PowerShell just because I could do all the servers at once.

Nuts, duplicate question. I said the same thing at the other location.

Please don't cross post. It just confuses conversations. Most of us look at multiple forums anyway.

I wouldn't put SSDT on a production machine at all. It's a development platform. It goes on your laptop or a shared desktop or something, not on production.

There are some minor improvements to code completion in the query window if that's the kind of thing you're looking for. They've also added some typing functionality that's useful. You...

Ha! Well, yeah, I suppose I would refer to...

Nope, the Agent doesn't do the backups, the SQL Server executable and service does. That needs the permissions.

So to test it, try something like:

--run this in one query window

BEGIN TRAN

UPDATE TableX

SET ColA = 'SomeValue'

WHERE ColA = 'SomeOtherValue'

--ROLLBACK TRAN

--run this in a second query window

BEGIN TRAN

UPDATE TableX

SET ColA...

I wouldn't say polling is bad, no. Not at all. It's one way to get things done. How you poll, where you poll, how often you poll, those are the...

Weird. Not sure why that's not coming up. Here's another one from Jonathan Kehayias[/url].

It does sound like you're confusing deadlocks with blocks. A blocking situation occurs when one process is waiting for another process to release a lock. By default in SQL Server,...