Jeff Moden (6/7/2012)
And, just to be sure... RAND does NOT return the closed interval of {0,1}. It's a closed-open where 0 materializes but 1 never does. As Dwain has shown there are a couple of ways to handle it depending on what you want to do. The key in the article was to make every keenly aware that while constraining such numbers by range and domain is quite similar to the integer method, you have to account for the whole number-line between the integers instead of just the integers.
Guess I need to spend more time with my nose firmly planted in BOL.
Thanks Jeff, yet again, for teaching me something!
My thought question: Have you ever been told that your query runs too fast?
My advice:
INDEXing a poor-performing query is like putting sugar on cat food. Yeah, it probably tastes better but are you sure you want to eat it?
The path of least resistance can be a slippery slope. Take care that fixing your fixes of fixes doesn't snowball and end up costing you more than fixing the root cause would have in the first place.
Need to UNPIVOT? Why not CROSS APPLY VALUES instead?[/url]
Since random numbers are too important to be left to chance, let's generate some![/url]
Learn to understand recursive CTEs by example.[/url]
[url url=http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/St