xp_smtpmail, by Gert Drapers works great. He's now at MS, but many people have been happy with that.

If you script out the table, you can see the collation.

I'd maybe give a try to bcp out the table, just to be sure it's intact. That's usually been a...

The problem is software changes much quicker than planes, so I'm not sure how well certification measures up. I'm still voting for more narrow certs. The problem with an MCSE...

What kind of job and where in Denver

I think that the outlines for the exam are a good broad based set of skills. However the exams don't test your ability to do them, other than the 431...

Kenneth,

shameless plug, but my other company, End to End Training (www.endtoendtraining.com) does some in Orlando.

You might want to put a note in the BI forums here on the site...

bold or brash?

Or a busy one

But only if it's not obvious. Don't want to read comments about "used a left join because we have missing rows"

Use something like "some orders don't have a shipper, so...

There is almost never an all-or-nothing risk. It's always to some degree.

As I get older, there's less and less black and white. It's always some degree of gray in there.

I tend to use Excel because it's lightweight. And ad hoc.

If you're tracking to prove you're working or to get more resources, either Excel or Access will work and it...

colin's solution should work. Definitely cast as a specific size.

Need auditing. You can use a trigger to insert a value in a audit/logging table when some event happens. Can't use a column in the table for deletes; the row...

I like beldu's solution, but left joins cause scans, so you lose the benefits of indexes. If you can avoid them, do that.

Be sure statistics update automatically, maybe even manually...

This with SQL auth? I'm sure you checked, but password? That's usually what I see with this.

I'd think if the default db was gone/offline, it would say that. Are you...