(1) Think about all the value this has for management. Managers can see exactly what people have been doing, how they spend their (salaried) time, and how effectively and...

I agree with the message.

The term 'best practices' implies that the prescription comes from a recognized authority, that the conclusion applies to all situations in all environments. In addition,...

In order to find answers to questions such as this, the first source is SQL-Server Books-On-Line

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms166100.aspx

David

For our data acquisition systems, all are at 3rd level normalization.

Our data warehouse uses the Kimball Star Schema design.

But. here is a real life example. Our server...

Crunchy,

You might be interested in:

1) Sensitivity of the data (needs for any special handling, security, encryption, etc.)

2) Backup requirements and schedule

3) Restore agreements (such as service level agreements, implications of...

Here is a completely different solution.

With as many rows as you describe, it seems certain that the source data acquisition application has performance problems.

If there are performance problems or some...

Regarding a date table, it can handle many complexities. For example, fields in the table could include calendar date, date in Julian format, week of calendar year, week of...

It is true that experienced programmers can read and understand double negatives without much trouble. My first reaction was, 'of course it returns 'OK''.

As we write code, we also...

dba-vb

When these sorts of puzzles come up, the first resource is SQL-Server Books-on-line.

A next authority is MSDN, the Microsoft Developer Network web pages.

(a) The following web site lists the...

The first thing to resolve is that a BEGIN TRANSACTION statement is an error when the database is in read-only status.

The next item in your error message concerns a table...

(1) The primary SQL-Server documentation is SQL-Server Books-On-Line. This is almost always your first source to solve a puzzle.

(2) In Books-On-Line, this is part of the description...

This demonstrates that the datediff solution does not change the age at the time of the birthdate. All the age results are the same:

declare @BirthDate DATETIME

set @BirthDate...