Maybe it's a good idea to refrain from answering this until the correct answer has been reviewed...

It does, but there are two problems with that:

1. It's not among the given alternatives

...

Easy enough. But I would personally assign whoever created that table with DATETIME instead of DATE to toilet cleaing duty for a week...

Well, there's usually not much real body to New Year's resolutions...

Brilliant! So now those of us who answered master_files are flagged as giving a completely incorrect answer, rather than an equally correct alternate answer.

I concur.

Dearie me!

Reading the exact same doccumentation pointed out in the reference, I deduced that the result should be 'x' for the single char column, and 'xxxx' for the longer column,...

Yeah, I think I'll sit this one out for a bit...

Ooops!

This isn't the first time I've accidentally clicked on the "Featured Script" link instead of the "Question of the Day" link. And to add to my confusion, I misread  "Can...

You know, I kind of prefer the kinds of questions where there is a way to answer the question 😀

Well, this doesn't make sense. If 'radix' sort is named the fastest method for vectors of integers, and this is the method selected for those when 'auto' is specified, then...

Interesting.

How I parsed this is :

• The explicit BEGIN TRAN increases the @@TRANCOUNT to 1.
• The INSERT increases it to 2.
• The COMMIT decreases it to 1
• The SELECT ......

As far as I can tell, there are actually two correct answers to this one. Both

LEAD(currMonthSales) OVER (ORDER BY saleyear DESC, salemonth DESC) AS prevSales

and

Just because you're right doesn't mean everybody else is wrong.