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...

you don't want to actually delete anything, because dev databases might contain the most cutting edge stored proc some developer has been working on or something, so you want to...

there's a few things you should check:

first off, does "select *from table " return any rows? here we determine that data exists.

second, could it be that the db is case...

even mysql says that stored procs are useful, faster and more secure...they also say their implementation of stored procedures is not yet complete...

for an expert to contradict the database provider...

this might get you started; LEFT,RIGHT and SUBSTRING functions can be used to get parts of strings.

note how im checking to make sure that the field is at least 8...

well, it depends on the field you are examine...is the field a "name" field? so you are going thru the data and making a best guess at the gender, or...