Christian,

The use of variables in Update statements has always been supported by Microsoft. The full syntax for the original Transact SQL Update statement is...

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update [[database.]owner.]{table_name | view_name}

...

Yes, I'd definitely agree that the 'Quirky update' approach is the right one. I've always used an 'order by' but never tried clustered index/hints to force the order. It seems...

I spent several years advising a large international manufacturing company on their software-purchasing strategy. It always amazed me how far the software companies, including Microsoft, misunderstood our core requirements. In...

Lowell,

Thanks so much for noticing. Yes, I wrote the IFCODE version just because I got so damned frustrated with posting SQL code into the new forum software (nothing anyone could...

I suppose it would have to be renamed the SAMP stack, once Sun has done its marketing work. I've always thought of MySQL as the database for people who dislike...

This one would catch both nulls and empty strings, I think.

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SELECT  CASE WHEN COALESCE(A.NAME, '') = '' THEN 'unknown'

             ELSE A.NAME

        END,

        A.age

FROM    names A

ORDER BY CASE WHEN COALESCE(A.NAME, '') = '' THEN...

I think that the derived table you illustrate is the best, safest, and most efficient method. I'd be really pleased to be proved wrong..

There is no message. What you see is generated by SSMS/QA. you can check the return code from the stored procedure in VBS if you want to check for the...

if you just run it on a list of servers and databases in SQLCMD. Then all your errors and status messages can be diverted into one file each. No problems.

e.g.

--connect...

Cor. I remember SQL Server 2000

You can still use the same trick, but the code ain't quite as pretty. In fact it isn't at all pretty. Ken Henderson showed how...

No Jeff. You don't need a cursor for this if you have varchar(MAX). Here is some code that puts all the database users for all the databases in a server...

Jeff,

It. requires three files and thought it was a bit too long to write up for a Forum entry. The reason I did it was that, by coincidence, Robyn and...

I've just done it in SQLCMD-mode of SSMS, and it works a treat. Normally, doing a script against a number of servers, getting the non-result stuff in SQLCMD is...

Yes, my head is swimming. I thought this thread was all about being asked about date calculations during an interview. It is lucky we don't know...

Sorry, I' thought I'd understood that you wanted to save your calculations in the table. Robyn's article would show you how to do that. If you're not quite sure how...