I don't like the "what's a clustered index?" or other trivia questions. Not because the knowledge isn't important, but it wastes time. As Eric noted, I want to ask questions...

This has been an interesting discussion.

I, too, despise magic numbers, especially when developers assume because they know it now, everyone in the future will remember.

I prefer a small lookup table,...

The Jones are doing pretty good, just to be clear.

I find lots of companies that want to move to DevOps get into the shiny ball syndrome. Google/Spotify/et al did it,...

I have always set autogrowth, by some amount, not %. I make sure each file in a db has the same settings.

However.

If autogrowth executes, I take this as a personal...

If you think advertising isn't effective, you're not aware of the world.

It is hugely successful.

The ads are prepurchased, so it's not the company. It's the advertising medium that is broken here. There is no linkage from your purchase to the decision to show you...

I like the cross apply, but not sure it's needed here.

Going back to the original, asita, is the goal to bucket rows for a report of some sort? what's the...

Audit and xEvents can capture this, but it's not a rolling level. You'd get a lot of data back. Potentially you could capture, periodically read a window of data and...

Why doesn't the CASE work for you?

FWIW, the 8KB schedule is online: https://eightkb.online/

Mr. Moden presenting, if you can make it, at Level 8192. Well above the 400-500 level of other sessions.

The more structured things are, the less likely they are to innovate, and often, we are tightly structured with planned work in our daily activities. Changing things up helps us...

I'd watch both. Filestream has performed well for many customers. The downside is usually the code changes to take advantage of the feature. If you are storing documents that are...

What I'd say about the backup approach is that it is better, but if you are changing this set of schema/data often, then this can be a pain point to...

You haven't really explained what a "problem" is to you. You mean the server will run slower? It could with any insert in bulk.

Filestream has tradeoffs, which is what you...

A few choices:

CREATE TABLE Vals(Val VARCHAR(20));
GO
INSERT INTO Vals VALUES
('AAAB-AA-43-DDD-2')
,('RECA-AA-3-CCC-1')
,('RECA-AB-31-abc-1')
,('RECA-C-3-T');

GO

SELECT 
 REPLACE(Val,'RECA-','') AS Option1
 , CASE WHEN SUBSTRING(val, 1, 5) = 'RECA-'
     THEN SUBSTRING(val,...