When I include a wildcard on both sides of the like string it uses the better plan and returns immediately.

SELECT customer.customer_no, customer.customer_id, upper(first_name) 'first_name', upper(last_name) 'last_name',

telephone_no, address_1, post_code, email_address...

What is the best way to present the plans? I copied them from SSMS and put code tags around them.

Ken, this works. Thank you very much!

I have solved this issue by issuing the following command:

ALTER SERVICE MASTER KEY FORCE REGENERATE

GSquared, both your examples were very helpful. Thank you all for your time and efforts.

At this point I have no choice but to use a trigger as bad a design as it is. Any idea why the NOT EXISTS clause is not working.

The seq_num handles the multiple payments per transaction. This is newly added so we can not go back and change or remove existing data. That is why there...

It turns out that the default for sqlcmd is qouted_identifier off. I needed to use the -I swith and now it works.

Here is some more info:

Table Definition:

CREATE TABLE [outlet](

[retailer_id] [int] NOT NULL,

[outlet_id] [nvarchar](20) NOT NULL,

[group_id] AS (left([outlet_id],(3))) PERSISTED NOT NULL,

[outlet_desc] [nvarchar](40) NULL,

[outlet1_address] [nvarchar](100) NULL,

[outlet2_address] [nvarchar](100) NULL,

[city_name] [nvarchar](60) NULL,

[state_code] [nchar](2) NULL,

[postal_code]...

There is only a composite unique key.

I believe it is part of this thread but forgive me if it is not and I can start a new one. The trigger I am writing needs to...

Hello, in a recent design meeting it surfaced that these triggers would need to compare the new values in the triggering table with values in another table before proceeding down...

How are rows inserted when a table has no indexes? Is the effect the same? Thank you.

Excellent. Thank you!

It looks like it is recommended that a clustered ascending sort primary key be placed on the audit/log tables. Why is that better for performance? Thank you.