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...

Stats should be automatically updating. Run them manually if you have big data changes (loads or deletions), or schedule them if you have regular changes, prob weekly.

Backups - Like Ronda's...

SQL 2000 - One mailbox. The reason is the service account logs into Outlook and Exchange/SMTP servers, using that particular account. You can do it personally with Outlook, but you...

Never turned this on, but I think EM does check periodically anyway to see if the server is alive. Even logging to the Event logs (which is annoying for admins,...

Carla,

I'd actually ask you start a thread in the SQL2K or SS2K5 Security areas on authentication. It's worthy of it's own discussion.

I will say it's good you're looking into it...

Robert,

Sounds like you either have a great job (if you don't mind chugging along) or a bad one and need to look around. Management has a huge impact on things....

I think that very little of SQL is portable these days, Jeff. The basic SELECT code might not be too bad, but I'm sure anything beyond a single statement requires...

I tend to agree with Jasmine. I comment stuff that isn't inherently obvious about why the code is written this way. A business rule, fix a bug, etc. I expect...

It looks like you want a sequence within each set of values. Is this something permanent that you need or is it for reporting? Meaning do you want to add...