happy to help. A common mistake that people make.

Couple things. Is port 1434 opened for UDP or TCP? The former is needed.

If you get the port for the named instance, can you connect remotely? This is in the...

That's a good test. Did the person with the cert try anything outside of the training? Did they actually write their own trigger or just read about how they work?

Those...

Good comments. The certifications do show some motivation and effort. Not sure they do a lot to test competency, but at least you know someone can learn and memorize something,...

A double-edged sword, but I...

This is definitely a big theme through my career. Trust is very easy to lose and tough to regain. If you can't be sure don't promise.

I'm not the cleverest...

Databases are separate things.

You could query for select count(*) from sys.fulltext_indexes and run that through a loop or sp_msforeach_db to execute in every database. That's the only way you can...

Express has little power and data limits. If they live with those, and perhaps they can, then it will work fine.

I'd think there is some admin headaches, someone might move a file or delete something thinking it's not important. There might be corruption that goes undetected, but those are really...

That gives the installation of the files for Full-Text search, not if it is in use. Enabled is a strange term. It's essentially always enabled if installed, but might not...

Thom has provided good logic. What do you want? 35 characters from the beginning and then remove any whitespace? Or remove whitespace, then take the 35 characters from the left.

As Phil noted, input types matter

DECLARE @i INT = 100
, @j NUMERIC(7, 4)
SELECT @j = @i
SELECT @i, @j

I have a home office, and I'm in and out regularly, but I do make it a point often to not go in there unless I need something or I'm...

Those are cool places. I'm heading to Lingen this year, from Amsterdam. I count the latter as I spent a weekend there in college, getting another 2 days this year.

I've...

Glad to see you've been to a few places. I've done a lot in the last 4-5 years, close to and in my 50s. It's a challenge to travel, though...