It's Schroedinger's darn cat again - the moment you start testing (debugging) you interfere with the state and alter it 🙁

I've so often watched people get it all working in...

Worked on something similar doing something similar.

Lesson learned (while refactoring) was same as VB et al code - break 1 big in to parent with lots of smaller sections.

When debugging...

There's always user-configurable events - something akin to the DebugOut in API calls...they sit there putting out info to anything that hooks in e.g. Profiler / DebugView.

Used it before in...

It's about trade-offs (the profit vs. time vs. cost triangle) and risk...if it does the job at hand...

Start designing for every eventuality and it'll never get done.

Sure there are a...

FYI I've ONCE come across a cursor using MS's FOR UPDATE enhancement which was WAY faster than any other update method I tried (all 'best practices')...can't remember the details, but...

Watch out with those clustered indices...the order is NOT guaranteed to be the index order.

There are a few cases - out of disk space is one I experienced, parallel query...

We (local council with 500+ permanent employees) had the same issues (our efforts were not visible + company vs. individual view) and solved it in the same manner - using...

Nice one, Steve.

The attitude to DR is scary sometime - one manager asked "why do we need all that - it's never failed before?" (grab brick wall, start banging head...).

Personally...

Good points...and since IT is such a vaaaaast field (even a DBA job nowadays) it has happened to me over & over.

Started as a Civil Engineer (those guys laying roads,...

Nice, except starting off with an example using the RETURN to return the answer - something I've seen too many programmers use because they don't understand its reason for existence...

Nicely done, Andy - don't know where you get the time but it is appreciated!

Seeing you mention the 'replace var name in a s/proc', your 'what about the numerous s/procs,...