You'd expect BI people to have a proper grounding in statistics but they haven't. It is very rare for someone who gives themselves a fancy title like this to be...

I have to agree that anything to do with SQL Server is entirely unsafe in the hands of the VS team, considering that the culture there is so foreign to...

@david-2.Poole

I reckon that it varies enormously with the product, and with a single product over time. In some cases, the data consistency problems haven't been exactly subtle. Did you see...

Search is tough but can be made to work well in an RDBMS. I was once tasked with doing a database that took every major news story from around the...

Sorry to boringly point out an article vI once wrote where I explain how to format cells according to content without needing to alter the SQL at all.

Making HTML...

@jeff

I must admit chuckling a bit whilst writing that article, thinking of the reaction of some DBAs I knew. I was, at the time, writing a website that used a...

It is now much easier to make HTML tables in SQL than it was in those far-off days. I regularly do wicked things like this.

[font="Courier New"]DECLARE @query NVARCHAR(MAX)

SET @query =...

@john-2 Neville

Oh so true. Yes, a similar thing happened to me once with a different company. In my case, the rival system used an olap cube whereas mine used more...

Oops I don't even remember what I meant to write

I don't think you do. What you mean is that you hate...

[p]Yup. It is the Grammarly bit that I choked on. From the first two pages of a google search....[/p]

"$140 will get you a year's worth of Grammarly, but you...

Beware. Neither the author nor the Grammarly site tells you the price. The Grammarly site requires you to create an 'account' before it reveals that it is going to...

I started out with a list of...

@david-2 Cuthill,

Punctuation is not everything, as your post illustrates perfectly. Bob Shelton is a good, well-respected author with many publications to his credit, and this is an excellent article.

Nobody in this thread seems to have mentioned this alternative technique. It is not as fast as the XML technique but it is very simple, and can be elaborated for...