It is most assuredly all about databases. One thing to come out of my experience with them -- apart from a rewarding career -- is an awareness of just how...

Jeff/Guru,

I only use SELECT * with [NOT] EXISTS. Should I be replacing the * with some indexed column (preferably one in the WHERE clause)?

P

Don't know how to make the .exe, but if you have a list of servers, generate the call to the batch file with parameters, something like:

SELECT 'MyBatFile.Bat ' + Servername

FROM...

I think they call this "Second Life"...

Feasible superconductivity, i.e., at normal temperatures and using affordable materials, and the brain-machine interface, are the two technologies I want to see happen, post-haste!!

As for the lie-detection technology, I think...

Just for starters, here's the table to hold the responses:

Survey_Id Question_Id Response_Id

1102 1 ...

So, I did a little experiment: I copied the calls to the stored procedure from Profiler -- 13 calls, with the parms varying slightly, but all based on the same...

If you're only looking for the existance of a single file, xp_fileexist might be the simplest way. It's undocumented, but you can get some details here:

xp_fileexist "c:\autoexec.bat"

File Exists File...

Sometimes it's not the SQL server you need to worry about -- it would have been fine in the scenario you presented.

But think of the network traffic #1 would...

Furthermore, suppose you were really clever, and going with option #1, you loaded up the info only once, when the user first starts the app, rather than each time they...

What does the data in the table represent?

If a row can be duplicated, what does that mean?

i.e., if you say it in words, and it still makes sense, then...

ALZDBA,

What I meant with keeping prod relationships was, for reporting purposes, it's not always the best/fastest way to get at the data. We pre-aggregate some data on the way to...

You didn't say it was a reporting db -- which might have led to the question, Is it necessary to maintain the production relationships in the first place?

PKs/FKs giving you grief? Seems like a fair trade-off for being able to have faith in one's data...and what's a database without meaning?

As another poster put it above, there's a...

In response to questions above,

Data comes in nightly, and occasionally on weekends. The distribution of incoming data over a week would be roughly 22% on Mondays through 18% Fridays,...