I keep seeing questions on newsgroups about paging in stored procedures, and whether there will be a better way in SQL Server 2005. However, aside from a few answers in newsgroups, I haven't seen any content on how to do it. So I'd like to spend a few minutes and share with you the...

I recently found a rather old post from Frans Bouma's blog, "Stored procedures are bad, m'key?". Since comments are closed (he posted it almost a year ago), I have to reply here. I'll state my bottom line at the top: Stored procedures are not only not bad, they're necessary for maintaining loosely coupled, application agnostic, flexible...

As a personal challenge, I decided to write a UDF that will work just like T-SQL's REPLACE() function, but using patterns as input. The first question: How does REPLACE() handle overlapping patterns? SELECT REPLACE('babab', 'bab', 'c') -------------------------------------------------- cab (1 row(s) affected) SELECT REPLACE('bababab', 'bab', 'c') -------------------------------------------------- cac (1 row(s) affected) It appears that SQL Server parses the input string from left to right, replacing...

Someone named "Krygim" posted the following question today in the microsoft.public.sqlserver.programming newsgroup: "Will defaulting a TEXT field to an empty string take up more space than defaulting it to Null when no data is entered into the field. " Before reading any further, I ask that you think for...