I wanted to run a query from SQL Express against Excel, and I found this:

As I was working on a database yesterday I came across a curious sight, multiple columns defined as numeric(7,0), numeric(9,0), and so on. It seemed like someone was trying to provide the database with the most specific definition possible for a number of different pieces of data. Having never run into this particular practice, I immediately started searching for a reason. Was it smaller? faster? better?

One of the best ways to improve your skills is by helping other people in forums and newsgroups. I was doing just that tonight and I stumbled on this piece of code here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3622685/transfer-column-data-from-one-database-to-another

For the duration of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe I'm responsible for a couple of Samsung MagicNet plasma screens which run 24/7 in the windows outside a venue. They're essentially 32" screens with a built in PC running Windows XP and a VNC server. They're pretty flexible as you can set them to open a webpage fullscreen then display just about anything.

Unfortunately, they're prone to faults and I have no real way of knowing when one occurs until I attempt to VNC into (or walk passed) one of them which brings me to the purpose of this post: How to ensure your remote VNC sessions are...

With this blog post I am hoping to start a new series of blogs devoted to the interesting T-SQL problems I encounter in forums during the week.

The idea of this blog series came to me on Wednesday night when I thought I solved a complex problem...

First Problem

The first problem, I'd like to discuss, is found in this MSDN thread:

Given this table