When developing stored procedures, there seems to be a lot of emphasis on ''get it done fast.'' Which means type all lower case, pay little attention to formatting, and sometimes throw best practices out the window. Personally, I would rather front-load my development time; I think that the costs I pay in initial development far outweigh what ...

This is probably known to all but I've just found out - MERGE command syntax had been modified since CTP6. In the beginning of 2008 I had built a system on CTP6 and this week, while preparing for production deployment, found out that procedures are failing with syntax error. It appears that in CTP6 MERGE contained the following blocks: WHEN ...

I do not know of a way to enforce constraint naming conventions using SQL Server 2008 Policy-Based Management. And although you can use DDL triggers, you will have to write code to check for name use as not all constraints require a name when adding to the columns directly in the CREATE TABLE or ALTER TABLE statements. For example, you can add ...

I am a bit new at sql server and am trying to resolve a coding issue that I have come across. I hope there is someone out there that might be able to assist me. I am working with zip code +4 data and am trying to range the data to reduce the size of the database from the current ~65 million lines of data.  The trick is that I need to range ...

Hi all I have a table name Fiscal Qtr, in this table basically i am storing the quarter data. CREATE TABLE [dbo].[FISCAL_QTR]([FISCAL_QTR_ID] [int] NOT NULL,[FISCAL_QTR] [int] NOT NULL,[FISCAL_YEAR] [int] NOT NULL,[DESCR] [varchar](30) NOT NULL,[START_DATE] [datetime] NOT NULL,[END_DATE] [datetime] NOT NULL) ON [PRIMARY]this is my tableand the ...

10 logical connections is a hard limit (see http://blogs.msdn.com/angelsb/archive/2005/01/13/352718.aspx and http://blogs.msdn.com/angelsb/archive/2004/09/07/226597.aspx for more details). If you go over this limit, it gets expensive from a performance standpoint. Also see ...

In the SSWUG Virtual conference, Earl asks, Paul, I am looking @ several million records. In each record is a nvarchar that IDs the record and a datetime for when the transaction took place for that nvarchar ID. I need to capture the nvarchar ID when a number of the records for that nvarchar ID was within a time period of the other records with ...

Dan Jones wrote a great post about Facets from the new Policy-Based Management feature of SQL Server 2008. At one point in the post, he listed all of the available facets and their supported evaluation modes. Since SQL Server 2008 is not RTM, and since facets can be added in the future, I thought I'd write a query that would list the facets and ...

I asked for some names of people who you would like to see interviewed here at Sqlblog and Erland Sommarskog's name popped up a couple of times. I contacted Erland and he was kind enough to take time out from his busy schedule to answer these questions.  So, here are the questions. What are the most important things a person can do ...

Earlier today, Will Sullivan posted a blog entry, My Statement on Stored Procedures, in which he emphatically states his official opinion of stored procedures as: ''I prefer not to use them.'' He then goes about dismissing most of the misinformation about why stored procedures are better than ad-hoc (parameterized) queries. The first bit of ...