Books - any of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels - pure escapism.

Best Christmas buy ever though was when travelling to South Africa for christmas - a 24 hour plus trip....

Our main business and finance system is making the Oracle to SQL Server 2005 jump in order to get off unix as the costs of replacing and maintaining the unix-oracle...

There are advantages to working for the government. Fraud awareness training is mandatory for all staff and there is a dedicated fraud department who can be called openly or anonymously...

If the question phrasing represents your standard of English then you'll need to work on it before you get a job here. Communication skills are important and many interview candidates...

What benefit...? Makes you look up middle join in BOL:)

The cheapest way - script both whole databases or selected objectswith the same scripting options and use WinDiff which is generally lurking somewhere on Microsoft systems e.g. Program Files\Microsoft Visual...

Grant - agreed. That's why my own .NET applications only reflect the underlying database structure not replace it. But we're all different so be aware of other ways even if...

Apologies if this has been said but it's a long topic to skim. I'm a .NET developer as well as a sql dba so see both sides.

The original post mentioned...

Moving user databases is DBA bread-and-butter - the basics that earn your keep. Backup and restore with EXEC sp_change_users_login after to tidy up. I keep restore scripts for each server...

Agreed - am I the only person who prefers to speak rather than send a text message, but when I do the message is spelled correctly and in full. None...

It's the same in any situation - if we get someone in we should take steps to ensure he is competant to do the job. For many trades there are...

Sending the newbies to stores for "A long stand" or "A short weight" are British institutions.

A colleague inadvertantly did this one morning to an awkward user on the phone...

That answers my problem too - and this post is so I can make the change:)

Thirty years ago I was in the final year of my Computer Science degree. It had to be "with "something (maths in my case) as there weren't enough computing units...

I've been considering whether to do a payjump as we are just lowly civil servants and an unqualified Post Office worker earns as much as us developers! I've been in...