In a bizarre twist of fate Management Studio decided to die around 30mins after this post, and then created the 'backup' folder in the location mentioned in the post above,...

I work in an environment where tables are the main thing I query against, sometimes I query against views, but rarely.

My colleagues (more experiences in SQL than me, and the...

SQLZ (4/2/2008)

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There's an even neater trick in Management Studio.

Expand the table, select the Columns folder and drag it into the query window - all columns are added in a comma-seperated...

GSquared (4/2/2008)

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Trader Sam (4/2/2008)

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If I need a 'select' that has a lot of columns, I'll script out the source table 'create', then manually edit out the extra stuff.

Deleting...

I've just taken Cees Cappelle's code, and modified it, that seems to do what I want 🙂

I'll be keeping that handy along with some other useful bits and bobs 😀

Thanks...

Ah, ok cool, ill get out of the habit of doing it then :p

As I said, it is not something I do that regularly anyway so no biggie.

Would...

I don't tend to use * very often to be honest, as its rare I need everything in a table, however, why is it so bad to select everything in...

Thanks Adam, it's really cool to see the different ways of tackling this problem, before seeing your post I was using the is not null as part of my sub...

Thanks for the reply GSquared, I may give it a trial at some point, however, I doubt those with the purse strings will go for it!

Thanks Piotr Rodak - I tried the example you posted and it makes perfect sense to me now.

Seems odd that it works fine with 'in' but doesn't with 'not...

I tried that previously I seem to recall, and it didn't work - for the record I tried again:

SELECT * from tblfirm f

Where f.firm_id not in (select a.firm_id from tbladvisor...