Well, I have seen a huge number of developers who have not heard aboit it at all. Yes,I’m serious.Recently, I had helped out tuning SQL Server performance of the database in pretty big and to be held in respect company with more than 10 developers. One day one of them asked me about the query ,which restuns the data without the error on his machine ,however , throws the error on the server.If I remember well it was conversion error.I checked both queries and indeed on the dev.machine it runs without the error. I know there is no magic here..and as you can imagine the dev.machine has installed NO service pack at all,but Production SQL Server 2000 has latest service pack (SP4).That’s all story. The ‘little’ difference could have made a big error witout testing as each developer has installed server and client tools on their machines.The SQL Server query optimizer is free to move/change expressions with new release of service packs or hotfix thus please make sure that you have latest service pack on your client tools and test the query as well.
How do we open a large table?
This question raised when we worked at the client’s side by one of developers. They use SQL Server 2005 (SP2) and remembered that in SQL Server 2000 we can open the table via EM and then specify (All rows , Top rows…) do you remember?
I rarely use SSMS to open/edit tables data, and it seems that MS just removed this option. In SQL Server 2005 we have TABLESAMPLE clause that used to open a table with lots of rows. So we only needed to see what kind of data this psecific table has without open entire table or using TOP clause.
This example returns an approximate percentage of rows and generates a random value for each physical 8-KB page in the table.
SELECT * FROM table
TABLESAMPLE system(5 PERCENT)
I’d really advise you to read BOL about this great feature
ms-help://MS.SQLCC.v9/MS.SQLSVR.v9.en/udb9/html/8868e8fd-6c42-4171-9eab-a0e38cb1bfd3.htm
