If your data has a small percentage of duplicates, then IGNORE_DUP_KEY may speed up your inserts. For larger amounts of duplicates, IGNORE_DUP_KEY may slow them down significantly. I set up two tables, stripping down all the irrelevant details, as follows:   CREATE TABLE t1(n INT NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY) GO CREATE TABLE ...

Suddenly seeing a brand new error connecting to SQL 2000 cubes in a single OLAP database - the other databases don't throw the error.  Searches online have turned up nothing.  From Excel, the messages looks like this: ''Excel was unable to get necessary information about this cube.  The cube might have been reorganized or changed ...

Visio database models have column descriptions, SQL Server has extended properties where to store them but, even if they share the same producer, it seems that Visio is unable to store column descriptions in extended properties so that other tools can gather the same information easily and produce a decent documentation of a database. After some ...

If you have two columns in a table that ''remember'' their old values in two different historical tables, as it is the case in AdventureWorks with EmployeePayHistory and EmployeeDepartmentHistory, you may need (or just wonder how) to merge these two tables into only one historical table that will keep track of both columns. This has ...