Mildly off-topic warning: It's "Dr. Pournelle", and I've heard he's touchy about that. One of my all-time favorite sci-fi authors. A friend who met him at a Con...

I don't know that certs will help in your career. They might, they might not.

There was a recent discussion related to that on this site. Check out:

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic642830-10-1.aspx

You can add those to the Where clause pretty easily.

If the sort order isn't 1, and all prior people have approved it, should the status be null? If so,...

It's my best guess of what he's looking for. That's why I end posts like that with, "Does that help?", or something to that effect.

And, yes, it's very sensitive...

Install it on a dev/test box, or a virtual machine. That's your best bet for finding out what's up.

After you added that column to the index, did the execution plan change?

Sounds to me like you could use a "Where Not Exists" to accomplish that.

Something like:

select *

from dbo.RequestRoute

where ReviewerEmployeeId = @EmployeeID_in

and not exists

(select *

from dbo.RequestRoute R2

...

Do NOT use NoLock hints unless it's okay for the people viewing the data to get incorrect information.

I'd start with checking execution plans for the slow queries. If you're...

I don't know of a direct way to do that through T-SQL. There are monitoring tools that can alert you when there's a deadlock. I think RedGate's SQL...

It's in a rain forest...

There's an entry in Wikipedia about soundex. It has what you're looking for.

It could be caused by a deadlock. Could also be caused by loss of network connectivity, or high network latency, or lost packets in a faulty network component. ...

Until you became rude and sarcastic, yes, I could do that. Now, I seem to have...

You can use Row_Number in a CTE to number the rows, then select based on that numbering. Is that what you're looking for?

In that case, I'm not clear on what a second table would solve.

I guess you could have a second table that would get loaded every 30 seconds from the primary...