I like SQL Server. It's always been my RDBMS of choice, and has pretty much been the standard at most places I've worked. But here at my current gig we use Oracle, and we recently purchased a third party application that requires SQL Server. Since this application wasn't going to be working with a ton of data, and it's probably the only thing we'll use SQL Server for, we opted to go with SQL Server Express instead of actually purchasing a full-blown edition.

One of the limitations of SQL Server Express is that you can't automate backups in it like you can the other versions of SQL Server. You have to manually write the backup scripts and then schedule them to run in Windows Scheduled Tasks. This really isn't a big deal, but it is annoying. So, as you can imagine, as soon as we got our databases up an running, the first thing I had to do was create some backup scripts.

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I ran into a problem this afternoon with cfqueryparam when querying an Oracle database that really had me scratching my head. In my query's WHERE clause I was filtering against a column that had a CHAR(8) datatype, but whenever I ran the query with cfqueryparam it wouldn't return any results.

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Probably one of the most useless database errors I have ever come across (besides the "Catastrophic Failure" I sometimes seem to generate in SQL Server), is "The MySQL Server Has Gone Away".

Really? Where did it go? Is it coming back anytime soon, because I've got work to do.

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