I agree - there is no real reason, to avoid MERGE. And if it seems to difficult to understand, you may need just some practice 🙂

I use it very often...

Short question: WHY should I backup direct from my local server to cloud storage?

Wouldn't it be much better / faster to create the backup locally and copy it to the...

• Basic
• a tiny bit Redabas (east German version of dBase)
• DOS batch files (wrote batch based GUI to launch my favorit tools and games)
• Delphi
• Cobol
• VBA (Access); used...

• This reply was modified 3 years, 6 months ago by Thomas Franz.

@Eirikur: of course it is possible to do the calculation with bit shifting, reversing, converting to binary etc., but WHY? Just because it is possible and makes some old assembler...

Very nice and informative article, but I miss one important point:

Unix timestamps are based on the UTC timezone (this may be clear for you but not for a random junior...

I wonder, where it would really help me.

The usual business logic (as total = amount * single_price or gross_price = net_price * (1 + tax_rate)) does not really be needed...

This article was wrongly linked under the topic "Columnstore Indexes are Finally Sorted in SQL Server 2022" in the newsletter from 20th July 2022.

I didn't find Steve Jones article with...

@Emmit:

why do you not use

DATEFROMPARTS(YEAR(cd.BirthDate), MONTH(cd.BirthDate), ABS(CHECKSUM(NEWID())) % (DAY(EOMONTH(cd.BirthDate))) + 1) AS new_birth_date

It would return random dates from month first to the month's last day.

why should this a problem? Random is random and each rule you add reduces the "complexity". If I know, that it must not be the original birth date, there are...

Just to refer to the orginal problem:

The root problem of the big log file could be fixed / prevented, if you would partition your tables. Ola's script would in this...

when you are working with dynamic SQL and particularly, when it uses varchar-parameters and adds it to the dynamic code, you have always to use QUOTENAME(), otherwise someone could call...

@hmbacon: you could either do 6 Updates each joining the base table or - if the select of the base table is slow / difficult - write the ids, that...

The DELETE WHERE id IN (SELECT TOP x) is still a very bad solution. You wrote that it makes a table scan in your first example, so I assume that...

@dave_rogers: I disagree with your "rule". It is often much easier to query a log table (even if it will be never joined to whatever) than to read / search...

• This reply was modified 4 years, 8 months ago by Thomas Franz.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 8 months ago by Thomas Franz.

ok, theoretical you could for the cursor "problem" declare an additional variable, increase it inside the loop and write a WHILE @i < 999999999 instead of 1=1

But what, if someone...