Nice, Grant. I got thrown around a bit more than expected last night and the back is a little sore today.

Don't let Gail fool you, she can throw with the...

It's definitely easy to get distracted when you're alone by other things. I have lots of people say they tend to go do home chores when working at home, and...

I used to enjoy the occassional cigar, but my life insurance didn't like that. They were pretty strict about anything, so I stopped.

Wonder if they'll still be around in 10...

I don't see much in the way of functions for 2005 (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms186724(SQL.90).aspx).

2008 has a lot of time zone stuff.

I thought in 2005 that all the dates were just stored as...

Robert, I'm sure they wouldn't mind you showing up a bit early every day 😀

And maybe you could schedule a "meeting" from 2:30-5 every day. Call it a self-reflection meeting...

How are you structuring the script?

count() returns an integer, so + is a valid operator.

That could have been ugly. I've seen Gail throw people around the mat 😀

Poorly written queries can easily cause CPU to jump.

If the application hangs, you might want to set up a Profiler trace, start doing some of the things that were being...

There are lots of articles on what a DBA should do. You might try searching and researching a bit.

http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/trial-software.aspx

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=7b243252-acb7-451b-822b-df639443aeaf&displaylang=en

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=04d26402-3199-48a3-afa2-2dc0b40a73b6&displaylang=en

Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of great design articles out there. It seems strange, but there are books that go very deep and talk relational theory, but not a lot...

I'd run a trace and look for what's doing this. I've never heard of SQL doing this for no reason.

Perhaps security policy is set too low for locking? Or you...

The big thing is do you know the format of the file ahead of time or not?

I've always been wary of automatic merging, worried that changes in logic might not trickle down well. However the manual review probably negates most of my concerns.

My guess is that...

You have issues in your IO subsystem. I'd have the vendor check it out.