Nice blog, Gail...great explanations!

I'll say, "it depends"...

If I'm looking to hire an "entry level" developer, there may be little or no experience to go on in which case education (math background preferred)...

Still, ya gotta admit, Phil... that's 5 times faster... if you make those types of small improvements in many areas of a whole batch that makes multiple passes on a...

Heh... thanks Mike, but you didn't read the code block just before the conclusion 😉 Like Ragu... "It's in there". 😀

Thanks, Chirag. Appreciate the compliment!

What a great way to start the year! Thank you for the awesome compliments, Paul!

Jason! Hey! How's the new job???

I'll bet I know why he wants it... it's probably to find missing ID's in a table. My first reaction would be...

That's what I want to know...

Why on Earth would you want to generate a Billion sequential numbers? That will take 8 gigabytes of space all by itself... it is not practical to do such...

True enough. Just listing options, Adam...

You are correct... makes no significant difference if you only use it once at the beginning of a sproc... unless the sproc is being called millions of times a day...

The correct answer should be...

... change the column in the table to the correct data type.

My experience with resumes is that when people say they want to "Beef Up" their resume, they really mean "stretch the truth" about experience and knowledge. One of my...

With the possible exception of some RegEx functionality, what is it that you think cannot be done in T-SQL without the use of CLR's?

If you setup Query Analyzer in the Text mode and use Tab's to delimit the data instead of commas, you can copy and paste directly from the Text results window...