I was interested by Colin's remark that a WHILE loop is a cursor in disguise. What are the comparative timings?

It has never happened to me as far as I'm aware, but Andras (of SQL Refactor fame) investigated a self-deadlock in SQL Server 2005 SP1 and wrote about it on...

Quite right!, IS NULL will always return either true or false, but I was trying to illustrate how a logical expression involving a NULL will return a NULL rather than TRUE or...

The problem with your original expression is that SQL92 and ANSII standard specifies that the result of a logical expression with a NULL in it is NULL. This is because...

Wouldn't it be less confusing just to say that NULL means 'Unknown'? (or 'unquantifiable', if you are a mathematician). Then the results of expressions seem perfectly reasonable. The only behaviour...

Steve, thanks for referring to my Blog entry. As you know, I've done quite a bit of writing for Simple-Talk, but I have no financial interest in Red-Gate whatsoever. I...

The whole issue of multilanguage support is tackled very early on in any database that is designed from the ground up to work in Europe, so others would describe it far...

From what I know of the folks at Red-Gate, I believe they bought the site because they love it the way it is. They are avid readers of the site, and admire...

Steve,

On the subject of your editorial 'The Million Dollar Miner', I realise that Factor Analysis is old hat, but as a way of predicting trends in a mass of...

Well, to get the sixth highest (or lowest with a very slight mod..) in every group, a simple way would be to skim off the keys for the top five...

Surely Mark wants to get a DateTime value into @Start_Date which normally corresponds to the last monday, but to the monday before that if there has been a bank holiday....

Quite. Sorry. My fault for not explaining fully. Just as David has shown, but for the other date format you wanted.....

--depending on what you are doing with the data you...

Forgive me for presuming to re-write your routine, but I don't see why you need the table at all. If all you are doing is getting the datetime value of...

This is what I understand that you want. Be sure to tell us how it was that a datetime got stored as a bigint instead. I'm fascinated.

DECLARE @SillyDate bigint
 

Thanks, David. Definitely an improvement, and takes care of the single quotes and SQL Injection risks. I was so tickled to get the original example working that I forgot about...