Very often, I find myself wanting to query system metadata for columns. Some of the metadata is fairly easy to deal with, like if you want to find column names, just simply querying sys.columns is very straightforward.  But if you want to query data types, it gets stickier.  There are type types listed, one that is the declared type, and ...

When I was editing my chapter on implementing a database, I noticed a really nice improvement in the error message I had from the previous edition of the book. Instead of just telling me that there was a value in my modification statement that duplicated an existing value (or multiple values affected by the statement), it told me the duplicated ...