If you have any option to use SSIS (SQL 2K5) instead, you can automatically reroute dups to a text file or even just ignore them. A nice improvement I've...

Even for an audit table I would use a surrogate primary key because I may have need to join to that. The article makes a great case for this...

I'd like to add a little dissent here to see what you all think.

I've never been in favor of using this universally just because it makes sense in some areas...

Granting access to only portions of the data is fairly easy if you are using SQL 2k, and this has supposedly gotten easier in SQL 2k5. The security is...

I think you need to look at your table structure as a starting point. Your table with the student and class id have fields, which is the natural...

It would also be good to know the "penalty" that NOT having RI has on ordinary select statements so that orphan records would either be or not be returned as...

MelS (11/19/2007)

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I've inherited a system in which all the foreign keys are disabled and triggers are being used to enforce referential integrity. The nice part about this setup is...

While having NULLS in the FK relation isn't unusual in itself, the fact that you have an "object" table seems to hold different kinds of entities suggests on the face...

When I took over in one place as DBA, I convinced him to let me put any db in question in a read only status. Although that generated a...

SQL Noob (11/14/2007)

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there are no good and bad or black or white in SQL, only gray areas and what is good for your situation

we have very few FK's where i...

I think foreign keys are crucial, but I don't think you notice what they do till they're not there. I've seen many third-party databases that don't have them, however,...

I've seen previous instances of consultants dropping the entire database and reconstructing it because the problem of solving processing updates can take a long time, and depending on the cost...

With apologies, I should have also suggested READ UNCOMMITTED as a possible solution.  It doesn't prevent a dirty read, but as I already said, for reports, that's usually not an...

It depends what you want to do.  The big picture:  the developer version is a complete version of SQL Server, but can't be used in production.  The express version is...

Dumping it into a temp table isn't hard, but you could also consider using derived tables.  The derived table is calculated within your parenthesis.  I've included a link to a...