At this point I am completely lost on where THE THREAD is, though I didn't see a #6 movie or a #7 book.

Jeff,

Nice post, and a great way to handle the phone numbers. I wasn't aware of NPA/NXX, and that's good to know.

I would agree with you that storing these values in...

Well, I'm hoping you don't work for my bank, doctor, mortgage broker, etc.

I've seen similar things in many places. I have had to implement the "change sysadmin password immediately when...

There isn't necessarily an easy way to dot his. If you have a read only table, set it to 100. If you have one that heavily changes, you will likely...

Your first step is to read the UPGRADE section in Books online. That will give you the steps that occur, and what the documentation is. If you don't understand something,...

I haven't heard from Barry. Hope he's well. Haven't seen any blogs appearing either. I'll try to email him.

Ok, but if you update two columns, you CTE needs to have

where i.colA != d.colA

OR i.colB != d.colB

And so on for other columns. You have to think about listing...

I assume you're working on the real syntax here. A couple things

1. The INSERT should fail as I believe the CTE will be out of scope at the end of...

You can also do this with SSMS

Here's a link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms175890%28SQL.90%29.aspx

It's a bug in the engine, and I'm not sure how many people will run across it, but it might be nice to know this.

The explanation has been changed.

The backup is always made from the instance, so it goes to drives that are visible from that instance. Local might have been a poor choice of words, but it...

OK, wanted to be sure.

I think the problem is that you don't have your string enclosed in quotes. If you were to print the dynamic SQL, I bet it...

Maintenance plans include a small subset of SSIS and contain their own installation of an embedded SSIS. Prior to SP2 they required SSIS to be installed. After that, some basic...

What are you passing in for @movies?

If you generate a set of random numbers, you can use Substring to extract out a set, like the first 3, and prepend and append parens.

select '(' + substring( randomstring,...