If you want to use TBD/NA/etc., you might as well just a one-byte status column. You'll have up to 8 bits to designate just "how" the data is missing....

I prefer to create those types of tables in the tempdb simply because that makes them less overall overhead on the SQL instance, because of the optimizations available only in...

If it's 128 bytes or less, use CONTEXT_INFO(). That will persist for the life of the connection.

kenambrose (2/29/2016)

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[[ non identity ]]

the relational term for that is "natural key".

I would never design a table structure without one. There ALWAYS is one, and if no-one can say...

j-1064772 (2/26/2016)

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Well you can always...

j-1064772 (2/26/2016)

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kenambrose (2/26/2016)

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it's actually pretty easy to work with an absolute ban.

You just take any column where you would otherwise need nulls, and make a related table for it and...

roger.plowman (2/26/2016)

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j-1064772 (2/26/2016)

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roger.plowman (2/26/2016)

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j-1064772 (2/26/2016)

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Otherwise how do you publish the information if no field can be left NULL ? Real life cannot be constrained by database design requirements. Life is...

patrickmcginnis59 10839 (2/26/2016)

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ScottPletcher (5/21/2015)

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JediSQL (10/31/2014)

In most conditional statements, like WHERE clauses and IF statements, the conditional expression will return TRUE if and only if SQL Server considers the assertion provably...

kenambrose (2/26/2016)

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there is another very negative consequence of allowing nulls. It is a different kind of performance problem, but a very real one in my experience. You may...

Btw, you really should strongly consider using ints to represent the StoreNumber and MerchantNumber -- the typical StoreNumberId and MerchantNumberId -- and looking up the 25-byte strings from a separate...

Do you (almost) always access this table by StoreNumber and MerchantNumber? If so, cluster the table on those columns -- using the code below -- and try again. ...

pietlinden (2/24/2016)

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I did mine differently. I checked for existence of both class types in the "attends" table...

CREATE TABLE Student(

StudentID INT IDENTITY PRIMARY KEY,

FirstName VARCHAR(10) NOT NULL,

LastName VARCHAR(15) NOT NULL

);

GO

INSERT...

Are the blocks specific to one issue or "shared" across issues? For now, I'll assume that Block is a completely independent entity. [If it's not, we'll need to...

hlsc1983 (2/24/2016)

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i meant to write like this: exam_year int,

The reason why i am using exam_year is because the marksheet that the system must finally print reads something like this:...

You need to use the actual semester number to record the grade. Year alone is not enough, nor is "odd/even" (bizarre!).

It really seems like this is some type of...