The best guide I have seen for 2005 is the following White Paper from Microsoft:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc966413.aspx

Another point on hints, from Books Online:

Omitting the WITH keyword is a deprecated feature: This feature will be removed in a future version of Microsoft SQL Server. Avoid using this...

The following article by Kent Tegels for MSDN magazine is aimed at hierarchyid in 2008, but does have a section of BOMs in 2005. In any case, you might...

Needs some refining, but essentially sound, and very fast:

DECLARE @string VARCHAR(4000);

SET @string = SPACE(1) + 'here is some text for testing this code';

WITH ...

No worries 🙂

Good luck with the tax calculations!

Now I have had to go actually run those scripts 😉

As written, both AGENT_DATA2 and AGENT_DATA2_ARCH are created as non-partitioned. Both are created on PRIMARY, and so are the...

Lynn Pettis (3/20/2010)

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Okay, I must be brain dead (I am trying to do my taxes, very mind numbing) plus I already trashed my test suite, care to elaborate a bit...

vidya_pande (3/17/2010)

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I have simple solution for you.

Copy 5 Million records to another dummy or staging table.

Truncate the original table.

And then copy 5 Million rows from Dummy table to original...

Brandie Tarvin (3/17/2010)

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Understand that minimum logging is different than "no" logging. You might want to change the Recovery mode to Bulk-Logged instead of Simple (unless the db is already set...

Highly amusing.

Lynn Pettis (3/20/2010)

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Thinking about it, it may have been done inside a WHERE clause, not the ON portion of JOIN clause. Just not enough time to go searching through...

Peter Brinkhaus (3/20/2010)

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Before I follow your link to that binary tree thread, I must admit I posted a solution on counting nodes in a binary tree yesterday. I was an...

Again, I blame the name.

All new DBAs 'know' that blocking and deadlocking are bad (:doze:). Blocks and deadlocks are caused by locks. Locks are...

You might want to check that over Lynn 😉

The boolean logic expression is correct, but the code isn't...!

Usually we use this trick to transform ORs into ANDs, not the other...

Ha! No worries - I should have...