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

CHESS is an automated tool from Microsoft Research for finding errors in multithreaded software by systematic exploration of thread schedules. It finds errors, such as data-races, deadlocks, hangs, and data-corruption induced access violations, that are extremely hard to find with current testing tools. Once CHESS locates an error, it provides a fully repeatable execution of the program leading to the error, thus greatly aiding the debugging process. In addition, CHESS provides a valuable and novel notion of test coverage suitable for multithreaded programs. CHESS can use existing concurren...

I see more and more people asking how to check if a temporary table exists. How do you check if a temp table exists?

You can use IF OBJECT_ID('tempdb..#temp') IS NOT NULL Let's see how it works

Straight from the man himself comes this statement posted in the microsoft.public.sqlserver.programming forum: “You need to read ISO-11179 so you use proper data element names. You

actually had “tbl-"on the table names! Sometimes “id” id a

prefix and sometimes it is a postfix.“

Of course you know who I am talking about? No? Joe Celko of course. So what is ISO-11179?

The ...

Which books should you read/buy when you are a programmer? I have listed 5 books that have helped me a lot. The books that I have chosen are not specific to any language although some of the books have examples in one language only. Design Patterns has examples in smalltalk and C++ but since the code is not very complicated you should have no problem converting it to your language of choice. I have included links to sample chapters for the books where I could find them. For some of the books I have also provided links to the author’s site; some of them have additional material so that...