I'm writing a class with several methods that take integer input. The input values cannot be less than zero. Since we're not on .Net 4.0 yet, I'm manually writing code contracts (that is, my functions check preconditions, e.g. before doing anything else, I write something like…

if (sequenceNumber < 0)
{
    throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException("sequenceNumber", "Sequence number must be 0 or greater");
}

This got me thinking: why don't we ever use unsigned integers? Seems like having a uint would better communicate the requirement, and would simply not allow a negative number. The main answer seems to be that casting between uint and other data types, which is inevitable, is ugly. And that uint is not CLS compliant. Even though I'm not trying to write CLS-compliant code at the moment, I think I'll stick with int – because that is our existing convention, and I don't see enough reason to change the convention.

Stephen's first law of diagnosing problems in production should have been: make sure you actually know the scope of the problem. We have a process that checks for duplicates in an inbound file. Records marked as duplicates are not moved into production. A refinement of the process was installed this week. All the sudden, e-mails showed that thousands of records were being marked as duplicates. I came over to help investigate, and found people looking at code, trying to figure out what was going on, because they knew without doubt that these records were not in fact duplicates.

But we needed to step back and ask what is the scope of the problem? We looked at the e-mail with the duplicates, picked a name or two from the list, and looked in the original input files and confirmed that they were not in the files. So how/why were they reported? But then let's set that aside, and ask: did all of today's records make it into production? If yes, then we have a problem but not a crisis. The answer was yes: we could see a 1-1 match between inbound file and outbound production data. Therefore, we have a minor reporting problem, but the core of the system was working just fine. Panic averted.

So what was the cause? A staging table that had not been truncated after a previous file was processed. All those records were being reported as duplicates.

"global temporary tables are visible to all sessions," says the MSDN documentation. I have occasionally wondered when this would be helpful. This week I finally found a use, albeit limited: I want a quick-and-dirty process that will e-mail a CSV file to me every day for a week. I wouldn't do this for a full on production system (without dwelling on it, it just strikes me as too error prone and inelegant), but for some testing I want to do over the course of a week, it makes sense.

I run a query that populates a temp table, and I want to e-mail the contents of the query using sp_send_dbmail. Again, the documentation tells something important: "Note that the query is executed in a separate session, so local variables in the script calling sp_send_dbmail are not available to the query." This applies not just to a table variable, but also a local temp table (e.g. #temp). But a global temp table (e.g. ##temp) is a different story: works just fine. So there you go, quick and dirty way to e-mail yourself some query results when you don't want to just pass the raw query directly to the send command.