Here is something interesting to think about

Create this table and insert these 2 rows

This was asked on twitter recently and I gave the answer there. I decided to write a blog post about this because I can use over 140 charaters here instead.

You will see the Cannot resolve collation conflict for equal to operation error when you try to join 2 tables. let's take a look at what we need to do to resolve this. First create and populate these two tables

A question was posted in our SQL Server programming forum today. A person had this stored procedure

Someone was writing some queries that brought back a lot of data (and I mean a LOT!!) and after a while he got the following message

Connectivity error: [Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][SQL Server]Could not allocate new page for database 'TEMPDB'. There are no more pages available in filegroup DEFAULT. Space can be created by dropping objects, adding additional files, or or allowing file growth

That is not good, fortunately this wasn't one of our production machines but a dev/test box.

So what causes this? You might think that tempdb is o...

The differences between LEN and DATALENGTH in SQL Server!

I have seen a bunch of questions about this recently and decided to do a little post to clear up the confusion.

First let's take a look what Books On Line has to say about these two functions

LEN

Returns the number of characters, rather than the number of bytes, of the given string expression, excluding trailing blanks.

DATALENGTH

Returns the number of bytes used to represent any expression.

So what does that mean? It means that the LEN function will f...