I stopped participating in QOTD when is became completely "out of BOL" quiz.

Greg, it was not about you at all.

It was about industry.

Industry which is in deep sh*t.

Machine computing is based on binary math. It's the way everything got processed in computers,...

2 nigelrivett

Never say never.

It's not quite wise.

Logic here is simple:

1) formatting is user-dependent. One day they gonna request you to let different users have different formatting. What you gonna do?

2) Formatting requires string-processing. You have a...

Un-bloody-believable!

How could possibly a dude having no idea about binary get any job in IT industry???

Hope you did not miss this statements:

"Updating fields in system tables can prevent an instance of Microsoft® SQL Server™ from running or can cause data loss. "

"On production systems, you...

I could.

If you would explain in details what you are trying to modify in system tables.

Yes, you can.

Just have SQL Server Installation disk handy.

You'll need it.

FROM TableA a

INNER JOIN TableB b ON ...

WHERE NOT EXISTS (select 1 from TableC c ...)

Insert into TableA

Select b.firstname, b,lastname

FROM TableB b

WHERE NOT EXISTS

(select 1 from TableA a

where a.lastname = b.lastname and a.firstname = b.firstname

)

Same approach for TableC.

1. Update must go first. There is no need to update rows you just inserted.

2. Update must contain only INNER joins. If data is missing there is nothing to update....

1. You should not be using character based or integer based data for the dates... you should be using the DATETIME datatype. You really need to fix your...

I believe for filling dropdown you never need to filter by categoryID.

So I see here 2 SPs:

1st - without parameters and with 2 columns returned - for dropdown;

2nd - with...

Not really good activity meter.

You can possibly have terribly busy server without a single transaction for a whole day.

From another side enormous number of simple transaction may take less than...

Is this hint good enough?

http://blogs.msdn.com/khen1234/archive/2006/01/31/520724.aspx