>> A better idea is to use the correct datatype. ,<<

I agree with that statement. In fact read his posted this in a wonderful single principal, for which a given...

I think this is horrible advice. The customer number is an identifier for a customer (I assume), and not a magnitude or quantity of some attribute. Therefore, according to basic...

Now add a CHECK(cust_num  LIKE '[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]') to your DDL) so you do  no have this  problem again.

Jeff, I don't see the problem with a noble end date. I don't get makes anything complicated.Given a table that needs to show an ongoing event that has not yet...

>> The case of employee numbers. Because only employee related records have an employee number, those not having any either are NULL (which I don't like for different reasons or...

From what you've posted, you start off wanting to treat this data element as a string, but then you're storing it as a numeric. You also don't know that a...

Many decades ago, I had to set up a calendar table (okay, in those days it was a file) for an enterprise that gave Easter holidays. I had to subordinates...

>> I have a table with sample data like this. <<

Thank you for trying to post DDL, but you have some fundamental errors. A table must have a key. This...

>> You know that YYYY-MM-DD is the alternate format and it doesn't work in certain languages in SQL Server. You also know that the primary ISO format is YYYYMMDD. Supposedly,...

>I got this to work, however,  if the month is 1-9 it sets the date to '01/01/1900' because of the month not having 2 digits.<<Clean up the souce data instead...

I'm not sure this is still true, but at one point several countries required that invoice numbers and other commercial documents have sequential numbering. This was a legal problem, not...

>> your examples didn't have a join in - they were single table selects <<

If you've done a good job with your schema, then they will be a lot of...

>> The very first thing that I did is to create a table that will store these Descriptive Labels along with the Actual Start and End Dates for that period....

>> What kind of join is this? <<

This is called an inner equi-join. It is the simplest possible join defined by Dr. Codd and should have been discussed during the...

I'm going to be pedantic (surprise! Surprise!). What do you mean by "return info" from a procedure? Technically if it returns a single value the programming structure is a function...