I don't think you're going to find that in BOL, Chris; unless I am mistaken LEAD and LAG are not supported by SQL Server. Oracle uses them to access...

Round about 1980, I set a design standard for my department, which started with

DNT ABRV8

Then there's the DB that WAS designed well, but that person left and various people have been asked to "just add this" in the years since...

OTOH I designed our ETL system with [Postcode] [nvarchar](10) and then had to change it when I found records with postcodes like 'If out please leave by back door or...

(As someone has re-awakened this subject...)

Jeff Moden (8/23/2010)

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There is sometimes a HUGE performance penalty (2:1) to be paid for using VARCHAR(MAX) depending, of course, on what you're doing. Correct...

I'd like to endorse what others have said about temp tables.

I use CTEs a lot, and often they make the query both more legible and faster. But sometimes they...

I've been doing this for about 10 years; currently with SQL Server 2008/SSIS.

Most systems I built are basically ETL + Reporting, and are scheduled to run daily to load new...

So basically it divides the data based on the MATCH condition before it does any INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE. Hence the match taking no notice of the changed data values.

Thanks; I think...

Odd. I read mail using Thunderbird, which can handle HTML mail well, and the message had lots of other graphics displaying as usual.

Looking at the message 'source code', I see...

I got one right, good! (I've used the . myself, usually as 3.0 rather than 3. for - as you say - greater clarity.)

But something went wrong with the...

I got it wrong too. But like many questions here, the answer depends on knowing the many inconsistencies and strange rules in SQL Server - most of which you...

Personally, I like to store the package as files because I can simply ZIP up the whole thing to make a snapshot for version archiving and/or for easy FTP transfer...

A question for people re performance.

As I said above, we use a date table, and as our significant dates are of type [date] (with no time-of-day), we can join ON...

I use a date table allowing lookup of Month, Season etc. by date and customer, provided by Marketing! This may sound crazy but it's a good way to deal...

I've had the same problem; I assume it is normal behaviour when starting SSMS that way.

What I do is open SSMS first, and let it connect to the server. ...