Man! Now I'm never going to get that one out of my head. It's doing "rounds" now! 🙂

I'm not clear on what your criteria are for which ones to delete, but one way to get rid of all but one row from a set is like this:

delete...

It looks like you probably had transactions open from the prior version of the thing. The current count seems to indicate that the change fixed it.

Try closing the connection...

Even "what were the sales last month?" is too vague for computer consumption. Are you asking for sales volume, or for what was sold?

If I answered that question with...

First, Try...Catch won't handle missing objects correctly. That level of error skips the Catch block and just crashes and burns. Anything that won't let the code compile (like...

To be blunt, your best bet is to begin to re-engineer the whole system so that it doesn't use such a view. From what you're describing so far, it...

Don't use implicit inserts. That's the best solution. Name your columns, in both the insert and the select.

Considering that I can't even get the Word grammar checker to accept the kind of convoluted sentences I often write, I'm not going to expect much from such a product...

Same deal. Run a trace. It'll tell you exactly what's being used.

I learned SQL from Paul Nielsen's "SQL Server 2000 Bible", but I have to admit I haven't opened my copy of it in probably 3 years. But, in the...

Run a trace on the database. Have it record which tables are accessed. From that, you can compare it to sys.tables, and find which ones aren't.

Just be sure...

On the completely non-sequitur side of things, thanks to your post, I now have the song, "Row, row, row your code, slowly onto the...

I'd have to go with, "try it on a dev box, see if it works the way you want it to". You can always change you mind, on a...

Sure. On the Notifications tab, just select "On Completion", instead of either "On Failure" or "On Success". There's a drop-down for it right after where you put in...

BOL is a little to sparse and summarized for someone who doesn't already know their way around SQL Server a bit. I recommend an actual book on the subject...