Thanks jghali and keep them coming! I saw this question and knew I'd get it wrong because some parts were vague, but vague questions are what we deal with...

This is a great question, if nothing else for the comments it's generated. It contains both a CTE and a cross join, and it appears that some are unfamiliar with...

Dealing with xp_cmdshell is even easier than this... it shouldn't be enabled. Article really should have mentioned that somewhere; "...can be a security problem in some environments" is an understatement.

Nobody can tell if you would have had the right or...

Another QOTD where either the answer is "It depends" and/or inadequate information is given. I knew that the answer was (x,1) but there's not enough information to determine x. If...

I'll chime in as well to say that IN is an operator. See BOL for list of Logical Operators

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms189773(SQL.90).aspx

This makes me think of Anton Chigurh's quote from No Country for Old Men "That's foolish. You pick the one right tool."

@jeff Moden - Can't do anything about you getting "knocked" but I can say Thanks for your always thoughtful and insightful posts that add a great deal to...

I had to laugh at the LOLCats spelling of Enterprise as Enterprize! Too bad the question wasn't written in LOLCats as well... "I can haz SQL j0bz in which edishunz?":-D

Good question, the "sp_compatibilitylevel" choice almost tricked me into getting confused with sp_dbcmptlevel (which gives the compatibility level if you just pass the database name parameter alone).

Carlo Romagnano (11/3/2009)

I...

This is the main reason I make it a habit to use COALESCE rather than ISNULL unless there's a reason I need the behavior of ISNULL.

Thanks Gail for mentioning that "When an index scan is done on the clustered index, it’s a table scan in all but name." Many folks think that performance is always...

Tom Garth (9/30/2009)

The question is specifically referring to SQL Server indexes. The Microsoft definition would...

Fill factor of 100 with PAD_INDEX = ON for reference (lookup) tables. While the fill factor of 100 is the same as 0 I like that this syntax is more...