Exactly The Wrong Way

Why are Republicans in secret negotiations with President Obama? Actually, I should rephrase that: why is John Boehner (seemingly alone) in secret negotiations with President Obama? Secret negotiations are a fool's game here. Republicans should be forthright and open in discussion, given the importance of this issue and the fact that they tend to get…

Invalid length parameter passed to the LEFT or SUBSTRING function

An interesting question showed up on Ask SQL Server Central last week, and I wanted to blog my answer, mostly so I can show pretty pictures and get credit for actually having a DBA-related post once in a while... The poster had a relatively simple problem: a view was returning an error which read "Invalid…