Not that anyone really cares but I figure I'll add the answer to this so it gets indexed and can help someone else in the future.

It turns out the performance...

Ok. So looking around I found :fn_virtualfilestats

But there's a new problem. It returns values on my development server but not on my production server. Is there a...

I began my career as a web developer using Oracle. I was with a very small company and I played Sys Admin/Developer/DBA. They gave me these tasks even...

Ah, darn it.  Somehow lost my post.

krs has a good idea.  Although I wonder about using the left([fieldname], 3) repeatedly in a case statement.  That's assuming that blood_type varies beyond...