What type of files are you doing this for?  Plaiu text., CSV, TSV, PDF, what?

You might want to send an email to webmaster@sqlservercentral.com with that question.

I think people have been going a bit nuts for the last 15 or so years and especially in the last 6 or so years.  I just found out about...

Interviewing for open position...

My boss: Rate your SQL skills & knowledge on a scale of 1 to 10.

Interviewee: 7 or 8

Me: Let's talk about backups and restores.

Interviewee: I...

Too much fun, Michael!

I have to disagree with the answer here.  If you run the code more than once, it comes up with the same 10 rows.  Therefor, they are NOT "random rows"....

Totally understood and I was just answering the new question.

Just to say it again, there is no...

Now that, I agree with!

A lot of people immediately respond with "Well, just turn on RCSI".  Folks really need to be careful...

Jeff. I'll take a crack at your question:

In your example, are you assuming the date column is indexed and would be used?  What if that is not the case,...

Agreed... all you have to do there is accept an extra 14 bytes per row and extra usage of TempDB.  Since...

On what grounds? 

Uh, because the data is right, and the implementation is right.

You set up a straw man, where this condition applies, and you don't care about this,...

The responses are as expected... some hardcore "NEVER"s.

To those people, I ask, if you want a simple report, say the number of products purchased by day for the previous calendar...

With regard to the following code from the article...

CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.GetDashboardStats
AS
BEGIN
SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL READ UNCOMMITTED
SELECT 
(SELECT COUNT(*) FROM Orders WITH (NOLOCK) 
WHERE OrderDate = CAST(GETDATE() AS...

It's gotten to the point where I evaluate changes by determining how much harm the change causes or how little a required change brings to the table compared to the...