Anyone remotely interested should read 'St Kilda Summer', by Kenneth Williamson and I Morton Boyd. It is a factual book about these remote islands and their amazing wildlife. It also...

Funny you should mention it. The other day, they were herded up into a neighbours garden overnight, where they ate all the mint and rosemary. They then went into my...

This is very useful, Jacob, and nicely explained. Thanks for that. I loved the format. I find PATH the most intuitive way of generating XML to a precise format. I...

I've recently been playing host, in my garden, to a flock of extremely genial and intelligent sheep. They are Soay sheep, a most extraordinary breed, described as living fossils. They...

As a database developer, I'm not keen on the idea of allowing C# programmers to treat a production corporate database as though it was an Access Datastore.  LINQ is flexible...

I remember the very first time I felt those waves of panic about offshoring and automation. It was in the late seventies. Surprisingly, there still seems to be plenty of...

>>this wasn't popfly.microsoft.com but rather popfly.microsoft.com!

Wow!

It is in SSMS Express that Microsoft took out the addins and extensibility. One can only guess that Microsoft saw it as an easy way of differentiating the two products, in...

I think that Keren has a good point. A lot of database developers are dealing with the task of revising existing code in difficult circumstances, or trying to tie down...

I love these puzzles. If the objective is to get at those pesky numbers, how about this? The code is slightly more complex so as to cope with those records that have...

Nigel Rivett's technique is worth taking a look at.. http://www.simple-talk.com/sql/database-administration/pop-rivetts-sql-server-faq-no.5-pop-on-the-audit-trail/ 

I love it. Congratulations, Colin!

Before anyone else gets too fond of Xp_Execresultset, remember that it was undocumented and is not there in SQL Server 2005, though it was in 2000...

'Ere Mudluck. It took me a lot less than an hour to modify your code so that it doesn't need, or use, a cursor or a while loop. C'mon 'cursor crew' prove me...

I really enjoyed reading this article. It is full of good ideas.

One point I'd like to emphasise is that  the 'team' management skills are easy to define and train. They...

I decided in the end that nobody was going to come up with an answer to my previous question about the performance difference between a cursor-based procedure, and one based...