ChrisM, that's a pretty standard way to get the last day of the previous month, formatted as YYYYMMDD. It doesn't have any columns in it, so you can just...

I do a common-sense check on the data before I send it, but it's just an eyeball-it-quick thing.

Most of the time, I can safely assume the person consuming the data...

Don't pad with a case statement.

Do it like this:

select right('0000' + @MyStringVariable, 4);

The simple "sum" function won't work here because you have to group by unique values in order to get the rest of the query to work.

If you can post the...

I uses server-side traces for this.

Either use Profiler to script the trace, like K. Brian Kelley suggested, or use sp_trace_create and sp_trace_setevent (which is what I do).

Here's a sample trace...

Something like this?

IF OBJECT_ID(N'tempdb..#T') IS NOT NULL

DROP TABLE #T ;

CREATE TABLE #T

(StartDate DATE,

ID INT,

...

All other ways of doing this that I know of are either much slower, or require using CLR objects in the database (which would also require the DBA allowing that).

You...

Thanks. Knew...

Yeah, dynamic column-headers is a pain.

There are other ways to write it in T-SQL. "Better" is situational on all of the variations.

You'll want to take a look at Gail Shaw's blog entry on the...

That's good. I was hoping for something on MSDN, but at least that allows testing of the concept.

jared-709193 (11/1/2011)

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GSquared (11/1/2011)

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Gail: I was trying to find a reference I could quote for that same answer. I know the data, but I can't remember where I read it....

It's called "server" because that's what it does.

There's a good definition at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_(computing)

It's not limited to OS-ware.

As for the first question, sorry, no clue. Never used it. What's...

Gail: I was trying to find a reference I could quote for that same answer. I know the data, but I can't remember where I read it. Any...

I use the version of BIDS that came with SQL 2008 R2 Dev Edition to build and edit SSIS packages that get deployed to SQL 2005 Standard Edition servers. ...