Is that official? I couldn't find...

That's two wrong in a row for me 🙁

The weirdness of ISNUMERIC is just one more reason I am looking forward to SQL Server 2012:

TRY_CONVERT

TRY_PARSE

Frank,

My prior post was written before I saw your latest, so it wasn't aimed at the points you raised. I'm going to decline getting into a debate about whether...

The various schemes for encoding numbers all have advantages and disadvantages. SQL Server uses a decimal type that has fixed precision and scale. All expressions have a well-defined...

I had rather hoped the...

Yes. The change first occurred in SQL Server 2005.

Frank Hamersley (1/4/2012)

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Whomever the bright sparks were that decided an arbitary 6 digit minimum is to be forced on the resultant without any other consideration except adding up the number...

Although a procedure can return result set(s), you cannot use them directly that way. It is possible to use INSERT...EXECUTE to store the results of a procedure in a...

Well, the rows will be in the stream anyway (having been...

niclas-1082356 (1/3/2012)

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The whole process of inserting/updating in done in the following steps

1. Bulks the txt file into a temporary table source (SourceId,firstname,lastname,email) etc

2. Rows containing invalid and duplicate data are...

The main point is that updates that don't change values...

I wrote about the details of 'non-updating updates' here:

http://sqlblog.com/blogs/paul_white/archive/2010/08/11/the_2D00_impact_2D00_of_2D00_update_2D00_statements_2D00_that_2D00_don_2D00_t_2D00_change_2D00_data.aspx

Also see this blog post by the SQL Server Query Optimization team:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/queryoptteam/archive/2006/07/07/659453.aspx

The MERGE statement can OUTPUT directly to an INSERT statement (this is sometimes referred to as 'composable DML'). You can add the required filtering to the INSERT statement's WHERE...

It seems odd, on the face of it, to use the older DATETIME data type (with its millisecond resolution,...