I don't necessarily pre-stage (with two separate staging areas), but I do prefer to do no (or minimal) transformations when I bring data into the staging area. All my...

well the biggest pro I'd say is you can check issues in the data easier if transformation fails because someone was again too stupid to place the correct values...

I'm a fan of prestage

purely that people who send you data "DO NOT KNOW WHAT THEY ARE DOING" 🙂

date format is normally the killer, and if it comes from excel...

jeff is correct , as are you- but avoid 10% growth at all costs, it gets painfull when you're in petabyte territory

I'm no SSRS expert - I tinker with it

but the point of browser is so that you can view and pick and choose your subscriptions.

i'm probably  about to give you...

most of the spam starts with https:// as the title, maybe suggest to the webmaster that we might block that kind of title?

I did notice that these come from different...

the same principle, a key value pair (maybe)

the brilliant pair of database engineers (mr boyce and mr codd) - (google them) devised normalisation in databases

1st normal form (remove repeating data...

when are you finding tempdb grows? is there a pattern? at weekends, every day?

i'm suspecting maybe sort in tempdb

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/indexes/sort-in-tempdb-option-for-indexes?view=sql-server-ver15

but there are other things that can cause this - joins or...

I have a bit of an issue with the questions table

you are fixed to option a,b,c,d

why not make a "question option table" and make it a key value pair -...

actually you guys have changed my mind, i'd like 2 people to be engaged in the process of changing the SA password

I got one right...

jeff- you just made me laugh out loud and spill my tea all over my new keyboard about job security. I was chatting to a guy I work with last...

if you look at recursive CTEs you can build a list of dates within your boundaries

then use SELECT DATEPART (DAY,GETDATE()) and exclude the Saturday and sunday values then count...

i iknow...

interesting.. i'll have a read later.

one of the things we were taught(more than 20 years ago) was how to do capacity planning, how many rows per page, work out what...

and maybe stick some transaction management in there begin tran, commit , rollback etc