(1) Get rid of the ActiveStatus column.  It's useless, and it can cause headaches for the optimizer.  That type of column really is a throwback to tape-based data.

(2) At...

No, it's not necessarily a good idea.  In fact, stop it first, then see what's it doing.  If it's using generic rules, like 10% and 30%, then don't restart the...

MS will probably get rid of the old-style joins at some point, but it will likely be a long while, since INNER joins cannot be misinterpreted in the WHERE clause...

It can be done using ISNULL().  I'm not trying to say that's necessarily better, just that it can be done, assuming col1 <> col2:

SELECT ISNULL(NULLIF(ISNULL(col1,...

Use "TOP (1)" to limit the results to one row.  For example:


SELECT TOP (1) Field 
FROM TABLE 
ORDER BY Field

For the time, I'd so a single DATEADD with only SECONDs being added, something like this:

DECLARE @order_time float
SET @order_time = 11456

SELECT CAST(DATEADD(SECOND,...

Create a nonclustered index using the clustering column(s) as key(s) and INCLUDE the search column.  That's about the best you can do with this type of requirement.

The data and log files for any given db must always be on separate drives.  That is, that a single physical drive failure cannot destroy both data and log files...

Interesting ... do DBAs really use the gui to do backups and restores?  I never have.  For one reason, then I have no accurate record of what was done.

You're welcome.  Glad it helped, because that would be a confusing error indeed.

This may not be the most efficient, but I believe it works, and shouldn't be too much overhead anyway unless you have lots of unqiue Ids:

;WITH...

Try some type of concatenation, like this:

SELECT
Message = NULLIF(STUFF(
      CASE WHEN Name  IS NULL OR Name  = '' THEN ', Name'  ELSE ''...