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...

I couldn't find any mention of the restriction on increment either. My gut reaction was to answer "error" given that an zero increment makes no sense, but as I couldn't...

Yep, I was wrong about that. And I even ran a test to verify my thought before I posted, but I managed to read the results of that test wrong....

It's important to note that SET @result = cast (@@rowcount as varchar) does NOT change @@ROWCOUNT. The first 1 comes from the last INSERT #n VALUES(3).

This is one of the...

sknox (3/8/2010)

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Rune Bivrin (3/8/2010)

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Good question, but which alternative is correct depends on how you define platform. If you define "platform" as "versions of SQL Server", then CONVERT works in every...