you'll want to do the following:

do this on test first, and not production. I'm recommending using Enterprise manager for part of this, because it will handle a lot of the...

I had previously written a script that does exactly that...build sthe commands: try this out:

not 100% sure that this is what you want, but this is pretty close: limiting to top 100 because this can be a whopper of a resultset.

there are several scripts in the scripts section that do this:

i searched "directory exists"

Verify Directory Exists and Create if Necessary

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/viewscript.asp?scriptid=1463

therre are several others as well:

don't try and find the items that are no longer in the view....create the OPPOSITE of the view, and have a schedule job email you or something for every item...

i typically bulk insert EVERYTHING into a staging table, and then in the staging table i would Select * from the column where column not (like HEDR%') and not like...

On the other hand, if the applications are even slightly related, there's an advantage to having a single, unified schema though...ease of deployment and maintenance, because you need to support...

structure wise, if you were to change it all to inner joins, the execution plans would be the same, so there's no speed difference...

i think this is functionally the same...

here's an example of random letters:

select ' C7116A-'

+ char(65 + convert(int, 25 * Rand() + 1 ))

+ char(65 + convert(int, 25 * Rand() + 1 ))

+ char(65 + convert(int,...

it sounds like you need just a random number of a fixed length, which you are appending to the first 6 fixed characters.

you already identified that a random number does...

a single query isn't too hard to diagnose, but rather than give specific suggestions, let me give you some general hints i think might help.

the key is to test the...

yes i meant that you had a choice on the naming of a foreign key;

you can leave the CONSTRAINT CONSTRAINTNAME portion off, and SQL will automatically give it a unique...

here's my suggestions:

I've added foreign keys to your script im bold below. I've always been taught it's good practice to have the Identity to be the first column of the...

i encountered this issue similarly when sorting a  formatted date in a grid; because it is text, it would sour by month, so all the 01/01/200X are together, followed by...

John thanks for taking the time to explain how UK postal codes work;

I've only being only exposed to US postal codes, which are all numeric but can have preceeding...