This (and MERGE) is why I have begun the habit of separating my statements with semicolons on their own line:

BEGIN

MERGE INTO

....

;

WITH CTE AS ...

;

END

This makes the semicolons more obvious, and...

So this is the VARBINARY equivalent of:

DECLARE @a VARCHAR(20) = ' '

, @b-2 VARCHAR(20) = ' ...

Hugo Kornelis (4/7/2016)

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Nor should you. In production code, I would always write out the explicit intent instead...

Good question, but the explanation is wrong on one point:

is not true.

The reason the NULL is eliminated...

While answer #4 is a true statement (and so is #1, as others have mentioned), it doesn't really answer the question.

WHY should you not set ANSI_NULLS to OFF?

Because SET...

Kaye Cahs (3/11/2016)

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In my opinion, the sort results should be unpredictable because NULL is an unknown/unspecified value, which implies it cannot be sorted.

I'm not arguing that the answer is incorrect....

Almost twice as many?

My math says that...

Bob JH Cullen (2/23/2016)

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This harks back to a similar post a little while back, and as a result I got this right. However, I still fail to see any logic...

TomThomson (2/19/2016)

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Nice question, but ambiguous wording in the explanation - "up to " can mean either "up to and including" or "up to but not including ".

Sometimes the...

John Mitchell-245523 (1/8/2016)

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There are circumstances in which option 4 is the correct answer. The question does not state that the table is empty, nor does it say anything about...

No. If...

I have never been so glad to get a question wrong.

Having never seen the WHERE *= syntax before, I assumed it was a new thing and picked what I...

patrickmcginnis59 10839 (12/16/2015)

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I'm...

Interesting. I haven't studied the plan cache in detail, so I guessed the answer.

There's a typo and a math error in the paragraph about query size:

There is a limit on...

paul.knibbs (12/10/2015)

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So "NonQuery" implies you never asked the question in the first place, which is exactly the point I was...