Thanks, and you two are probably two of those "successful" people because of your principles.

Even with this, I'd argue you won't know.

If I update row 12 now and you update row 16 in a minute, we'll only see the last update (row 16)....

Take Grant's suggestion and create a CTE to hold the data and use that in your joins.

Speaking of funny looking, I got a "twas the night before Christmas" for next Thursday. I now need to go find an ugly Christmas sweater and a Santa hat.

I assume you've been through the "What's New"? http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb386063.aspx

Fundamentally I'm not sure there are things you "need" in VS 2008. You could get a trial and see if you see...

Sorry, Bru, I removed the other post. I'll edit yours.

The DTC service ensures that a transaction that crosses two servers, say an insert, actually completes on both servers. There are...

An ER diagram is typically built to show the relationships in the tables. If you have those tables, those are what would appear in the ER diagram and be related...

Log shipping is strictly a

- log backup

- network file copy

- log restore

While SQL Server can secure communications, it doesn't secure the file copy. That's a windows function. You'd need to...

A DDL trigger will grab things, but here's a problem. If you store this in the db, once the user has sysadmin, they can erase their tracks.

If you trigger on...

Data compression white paper: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd894051.aspx

The compression applies to structures coming off disk, and in memory in some cases, so it can increase the IO rates that you appear to get.

You'd have to scan all databases for login mappings and then look for something that didn't have a match. I might create a table, load in matches from each database...

If this is homework/exam question, you need to do some more work, or show us what you think needs to happen to answer the question. We are happy to help...

If you show some code, or what you're trying to do, we could help.

If you're moving to 2008 on the database, I think that you might want to use VS2008, only so that you don't find something that would work well in the...

No real disadvantage for using the max.

Text/ntext/image are deprecated and will be removed in the next version or two.