The Blob analogy is a good one. I always wondered why that film terrified me so much. Actually I think that there are two blobs. The project itself , and...

[p]I'm in awe of Steve's writing skills myself. His sentences are...

At my age, I can't resist being called a SQL Stud.

You'll need to pop a persisted, computed, column based on the formula CONVERT(INT, SUBSTRING(CardNum, 1, 9)) into the BATCHTRANS...

Firing? how crude.

In any large company, the effort and expense involved, to say nothing of the negative visibility to oneself, precludes any possibility of sacking (firing) this guy. It...

A while back, Robyn and I wrote a CLR workbench for Simple-Talk. I was rather pleased with it because it didn't require Visual Studio. Even the ISQL mob would have...

[p]I hope I'm not mentioning anything that you are covering in subsequent articles, but when you need row and column totals, averages, or other aggregations, then suddenly the CUBE and...

True, Steve. I once didn't even realise TSQL had a Goto...but then the first time I ever came across a goto and a cursor in the same sp was in...

I think that there is a problem with trying to lay down hard and fast rules as to what is 'Best Practice' with Transact SQL. For some reason, we are...

Are you sure that you have given permission to SQL Server Service Account to create the directory? (check the service itself and see what log on it is using.)

The best...

Oops

I've just seen Chris Morris solution in the original forum, which is pretty much the same as mine. He got there first. I'll shut up!

Yes. Shaun

The Sybase and SQL Server Update command allows the use of variables in the SET statement. In the case of SQL Server 2005, this is....

SET

...

Aiee! Yes, I tapped it in a bit of a hurry. Any delimiter between the values will help the hash. My only worry is that it found one more row...

Surely this is the simplest solution? (be warned of a nasty catch when creating these 'quirky updates'. the order of execution of the update is -variable assignments first then column...

Yes, the Prettifier is still there to translate SQL code into IFcodes. on http://extras.sqlservercentral.com/prettifier/prettifier.aspx?style=5

The style=5 at the end puts you straight into IFcode style. It would certainly be neat to...

Well, yes. Pivot tables are fiddly to do 'on the fly' in SQL Server I grant you. Also, you get free graphs, and drill-down if you use Excel. I quite...