the table sysservers has all the linked servers that have been added;

select * from sysservers

with that info, you could do an

IF NOT EXISTS(SELECT NAME FROM SYSSERVERS WHERE SRVNAME='LINKEDSERVERNAME')

BEGIN

--..code...

OK I'll ask the obvious:

if SMO is available, why would you create a separate instance, eating up resources, instead of just adding a database to the existing installation you already...

I believe it has to do with how the linked server was set up...the default is "no security context", which is not what you want.

go to your linked server properties;...

in this specific case, this error:

Exception message: Column 'TFTAgentName' does not belong to table .

seems to be pretty straight forward;

I would guess that a SQL statement that is loading specific...

nice solution ashokdasari

, i didn't realize the OP might still want the data in Hours and Minutes.

the trick is you've got to take the minutes, i.e. "25", turn them into a decimal and divide by 60 so you get the part of an hour

create table #Example(TimeTaken...

Thanks Gail; This query is a rollup of a bunch of financial data based on it's attributes, so there's no WHERE statement in it....just a bunch of GROUP BY stuff...

for me, the biggest advantage for switching to compatibility 90 is the row_number() function; I've solved a couple of important SQL's with that function easier than if I had to...

it took a while for this one to soak in. I read the requirement a couple of times, and kept thinking it's gotta be possible by using the stored...

the above advice is not correct. you can connect to a...

doh i'm sorry; i jumped to conclusions and thought the question was "how to assign/deny permissions to a role" ; Lemme test a couple of thoeries and i'll post the...

something like this example might help.

I'm creating 3 roles...one that is almost-but-not-quite-admin, one for regular users, and a third to explicity deny deletion rights.

i then assign various users to those...

no, my point was indid=1;

in my case the difference between the totals was 3x the number of rows, but 6 times the mb size:

SELECT SUM([# of Pages]) as NumPages,

Sum([# of...

dynamic results means dynamic SQL. there's no other way to do it.

if you only have read access, you could not create a stored procedure to run dynamic sql anyway, right?

basically,...

SQLRecon is a good tool that finds installs and instances, and tests them for a lot of security holes like blank passwords, etc.