Jeff Moden (8/6/2013)

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If you've read my article, you know that nor am I fond of INSERT/EXEC.

As long as I have control over...

Because the sky is blue.

T-SQL as a programming language is fairly primitive, and far from all commands accepts variables or expression where you want them to.

If you feel that this...

Lowell (8/6/2013)

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well in general, "particular column does not a character" would mean a NOT LIKE '%X%' pr PATINDEX =0, right?, so that would requre a table scan of all rows,...

If they can be named anything, why even bother about them?

You are talking about a spreadsheet, but maybe you could explain the entire process? Why would the names in a...

Here is a batch. I'm using temp tables, because I estimate that a single-query solution would be less efficient.

Note that the solution does not include rows with ParentId = 1000,...

Yes, "linked server" is an eloquent way to spell "trouble".

How much data are you trying to insert? What is the speed of the network connection between the two servers?

That he agrees with Gail.

WolfgangE (8/6/2013)

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Really? As far as I know the standard behavior is that an exception does not influencde the transaction. You raise an exception, any currently open transaction remains open and...

I can understand that since you are looking for all sorts of products, that you don't want to engage in anything SQL Server-specific like SMO. However, the PowerShell option that...

Phil Parkin (8/5/2013)

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Microsoft are keen on recommending on what they happened to come most...

No. But why would you do START FULL POPULATION every time? If you have change tracking on, you can do START UPDATE POPULATION instead. And in that case you may...

"Way around" is may be not the most approriate description, since you seem to be inventing your rules. And the whole idea looks funny. Do you really have umpteen colunms...

Thus, you got a good incentive to reconsider your solution.

I recommend writing a CLR stored procedeure instead of using sp_OAxxxxx.

But you should not make SOAP requests inside a...

drlloyd2 (8/5/2013)

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Of the 42 columns returned by the query, commenting out any arbitrary combination of 14 of them will make the query work. Doesn't matter which ones I take...

No, that old syntax for RAISERROR (which has been deprecated since SQL 6.0 released) does not work in SQL 2012 in any compatibility mode.

Ironically, SQL 2012 includes a new command...