SQL Server 2005 provides a mechanism called CTE or Common Table Expressions for pre-loading data or setting up for later use.  It is really fast compared to pre-2005 which did not have such a feature. To illustrate I'll take some hierarchical data and load it into a CTE.  This would be a ... [More]

Do you use database projects in Visual Studio? If not, then now is a good time to start. It is the best way I have found to source control my databases without actually sticking the database file itself in the repository. It is very simple to add to your solution and creates a default directory structure for your create scripts, change scripts and queries. Best of all the project will be recognized by source control and added to the source code repository. This means you can keep versioned scripts for maintainability. It also gives you the option to do the dreaded rollback!. [More]