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I just lost half an hour of my life which I'll never get back on this. Don't make the same mistake. I extracted some customer details for a mailing (it's OK, they ticked the box that they want to hear about our special offers) but Marketing...
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I'm currently working on an application so that our Marketing department can produce most of their own mailing lists without my having to get involved. It was all going well until I got stuck on the bit where the actual SQL query is generated but...
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I added a parameter to a report today, which put it the end of the list the user fills in before running the report. I wanted to move it higher up the list but they are presented in a tree structure. You can edit each parameter but there's no sign...
I'm currently looking into dropping unused indexes to reduce unnecessary overhead and I came across a very good point in the excellent SQL Server MVP Deep Dives book that I haven't seen highlighted anywhere else. I was thinking it was simply a...
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I'm busy setting up a new server to replace our main live server and part of that is to get the logins copied over. The database users will come over when I restore the databases but I wanted to get the logins they relate to, with the same SIDs, passwords...
The day before yesterday I saw our main live server's CPU go up to constantly 100% with just the occasional short drop to a lower level. The exact opposite of what you'd want to see. We're log shipping every 15 minutes and part of that involves...
This one is mainly a personal reminder but I hope it helps somebody else too. Let's say you have a table that covers something like currency exchange rates with columns for the start and end dates of the period each rate was applicable. Now you need...
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Today I tripped over a problem that was new to me. I wanted to find out, in SQL, whether a folder existed in the file system. I knew about using xp_fileexist to check for existence of a file but what about a folder? Well, it doesn't work on a folder...
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The developers of Management Studio and, before that, Query Analyzer have made a bit of a habit of building killer features and then hiding them in the small print of Books Online. Now you may already know that SQL 2000 introduced a new way to arrange...
Just found the answer to something that has been irritating me slightly for ages: how to give a user access to a report without giving them access to all the other reports in the folder. We have folders that are based on the roles people perform in the...