Disaster preparation is something most people don't do well. And I don't just mean for computer-related issues.

How many people learn basic first aid? How about CPR? How...

One place I used to work, they refuse to put business rules in the database, as much as possible. Prefer to have them in a "business logic layer". ...

Instead of casting as an Integer, take a look at the Floor function in Books Online.

If the job is already running, it doesn't even try to start it, and waits till the next scheduled time after it finishes the current run.

In your example, it wouldn't...

MSDN has some good tutorials. That might be a good place to start.

This site and related sites will be a really good place to find any gradient of difficulty...

Add something about the date being greater than getdate()-90 to Flo's query, and you have what you seem to need.

Are you familiar with basic query writing? I'm asking because...

Ah. Didn't see the prohibition against dynamic SQL. In that case, even though it performs slightly worse, I'd go with the Row_Number version, because otherwise you're going to...

If hard-coding the date ranges in there works, then yes, that definitely outperforms the Rank/Row_Number version.

An alternative to hard-coding it would be something like this:

declare @sql varchar(max);

select @sql = coalesce(@SQL...

You can cast ntext to nvarchar(max) and then cast that to XML, and then use XQuery on that.

XML disappears from the forums. If you want help on the actual...

Yeah, I'm looking at the same type of solution, but wanted to determine if it should be Row_Number, Rank, or Dense_Rank.

Split based on what criteria?

If there are ties, do you want all the people, or just the top 10 rows.

For example, if in December 2008, the top 9 had a sales volume of 500,...

You need to slightly modify the XQuery in the value function. I've attached a sample using your sample data.

What I've done in it is add a "/." to the...

Declare @workflow_activity_type_identifier int,

@workflow_identifier,

@Date datetime

select @workflow_activity_type_identifier=workflow_activity_type_identifier from workflow_activity,

@Date = End_Date

where workflow_activity_identifier = @workflow_activity_identifier

Why not just declare a datetime variable and grab the value when you get the activity type identifier? Will that not do what you need?