Copying table structure in SQL Server

Why didn't I know this? For so many years I've bemoaned the fact that SQL Server doesn't have MySQL's CREATE TABLE LIKE statement:

CREATE TABLE NewTable LIKE ExistingTable

Um, er, except it does:

SELECT TOP 0 INTO NewTable FROM ExistingTable

The INTO clause of SELECT...

"...creates a new table in the default filegroup and inserts the resulting rows from the query into it." (MSDN link)

And of course, if you use TOP 0, there are no rows — but the table structure still gets created. (Naturally, if you want to copy the data as well, just leave off the TOP 0.)
Sometimes, you think you know something doesn't exist, and it turns out you just haven't looked hard enough to find it...
Happy coding,

Google Apps migration and multiple accounts

Non-coding post today. If you use Google Apps for your Domain, you've either been transitioned to the new "full" infrastructure or you soon will be. If like a lot of people you have this crazy idea that your personal and professional lives should be separate, and so you have separate accounts for personal and private stuff, you'll run into the problem that your Google Apps stuff and your Google stuff now share an account cookie, and so trying to (say) view your personal email when you're logged into a Google service with your professional account will fail because you're logged in with your personal account. Sigh. If only there'd been a way to anticipate that this might be a problem and design and implement the solution properly before involuntarily migrating people over.

The good news is that Google now supports multiple account login in many of its services. You lose offline mail and calendar (huh?) and there are some other caveats, and it's still a PITA to use, but when/if you do manage to get signed into your multiple accounts on the services you mostly use, it does sort of work, a bit.

Hopefully as time marches by, the multiple accounts stuff will improve and spread to their other services.

Release: place5 placeholder emulator plugin (alpha)

Just briefly, folks, I'm writing to announcing the alpha release of my place5 jQuery plugin. It's just a dead-simple plugin that emulates HTML5 placeholder attribute behavior on browsers that don't support it natively. On browsers that do, it stays out of the way (unless you tell it to take over), but it quietly does the job for you on browsers that don't do it themselves. Check it out! This is alpha, throw issues into the issue tracker on the project site if (when!) you find them.