Great question.

But the version should have been specified. In SQL 2000 you can see the execution plan even for encrypted procs. Although that would probably have been a dead giveaway...

Good question!

I was pretty sure that the first create would fail since the operator ^ isn't described in BOL under arithmetic operators. It never occured to me that it could...

Oleg Netchaev (10/29/2010)

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Oh well, I lost a precious point on this one. The statement in question

select @a =+ @b-2

looked so ridiculous that it made me think...

Carlo Romagnano (10/29/2010)

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I think the question author CONFUSED himself with the syntax for compound operators,...

I realized there was probably a 50% risk of getting it wrong which I did. :crying:

Interestingly in BOL it wasn't specified whether assigning a new identifier with NEW_BROKER actually enabled...

Good question!

Maybe I shouldn't admit it, but Activity Monitor is something I had completely missed. DOH!

Hugo Kornelis (10/13/2010)

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It is your client software that converts this to a character representation so that you can see it on your screen. The client software chooses to represent these...

MHilsher (9/24/2010)

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Rune,

I've got some similar situations in a database that I'm working with and found that the alternative seems to be just as bad. We've created functions to get...

jeff.mason (9/24/2010)

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As far as NULLs go, I have to say NULL is a good thing for some DATE columns. If you have, say, a StartDate and an EndDate column,...

sjimmo (9/24/2010)

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I...

Agreed. And the SQL standards agree too, if...

Hugo Kornelis (9/24/2010)

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See the reply by Toreador to see why the distinction between zero-length string and NULL can be very important.

As to the GUI - though I'd never call the...

Toreador (9/24/2010)

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Rune Bivrin (9/24/2010)

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However, looking the table in the question I'd probably remove the NULL-ability on the cell phone numbers. Nullable VARCHAR often doesn't make sense. Particularly when they are...

Hugo Kornelis (9/23/2010)

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Third bullet:

"A table should avoid nullable columns."

No. A table should avoid unnecessary nullable columns. When values may be missing in a column, making the column nullable is actually...

While I agree that errors aren't good, I didn't really notice them in this question. I looked up "deprecated features" in BOL, and found a reference to sys.dm_os_performance_counters. Matching that...