Great article, very interesting and thought provoking.

Thanks again for taking the time to post this.

To give the best chance of using minimal logging, be sure to lock the table that is being INSERTed into:

...

INSERT INTO dbo.B WITH (TABLOCK)

...

That's an extraordinarily complex task when you really look into the more difficult cases, with honorifics (Dr., etc.), suffixes (III, IV) and so on.

I would do this process one time,...

Or this:

SELECT lastName, LEFT(lastName, 5) AS lName FROM myTable

SELECT SUM(Expenses) AS Expense, Vendor, MAX(UploadDate) AS UploadDate
FROM dbo.a_table
GROUP BY Vendor

If it's not Azure, i.e. you have access to the master db, create a proc in the master db and you can use it from any db and it will...

You don't have a FROM clause in the subquery, so it's not really a valid subquery, even if the "Z" alias is defined somewhere else in the query.

You'd be better...

declare @minutes_interval int
set @minutes_interval = 15 /*or 10 or 60 or whatever*/

select 
    dateadd(minute, datediff(minute, 0, starttime) / @minutes_interval * @minutes_interval, 0),
  ...

Based on the extremely limited info so far, I would say this is likely the (very) rare case where you should leave the main table as a heap and create...

Datetimes are char data when inputting to SQL Server.  As long as the value is valid, don't specify your own CAST or CONVERT, let SQL do it implicitly.

If you have...

Several.  In our normal course of business, we do periodic restores, and I request periodic restores just to make sure they're working correctly.  This particular company has done extremely well...

I gotta say, my life's been so much easier since we out-sourced the backup part of my DBA job.  I just define the backup rules, and someone else insures the...

Here it is.

DECLARE @end_date date
DECLARE @semester_name nvarchar(10)
DECLARE @sql nvarchar(max)
DECLARE @sql2 nvarchar(max)
DECLARE @start_date date

SET @semester_name = 'Winter'

SELECT TOP (1) @start_date = begDtg, @end_date = endDtg
FROM dbo.trainingSemester
WHERE semesterName =...

SELECT OrderId
FROM OrderItems
GROUP BY OrderId
HAVING SUM(CASE WHEN Status = 'Shipped' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) < COUNT(*)

Yup - I did that in a few cases where squeezing any amount of...