I'm just going to repeat what I posted before, just a little more focussed:

Straight from BOL again:

varchar [ ( n | max) ]

max indicates that the maximum storage size...

duplicate post.

please continue discussion here .

To describe your scenario providing ready to use data is not a "criteria for getting help" but it'll increase your chance of getting answers that meet your scenario.

Based on your...

AFAIK you can use VARCHAR(MAX).

Straight from BOL:

varchar [ ( n | max ) ]

Variable-length, non-Unicode character data. n can be a value from 1 through 8,000. max indicates that...

Jacob Pressures (9/9/2009)

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By the way i do have some William Smiths and some are ambiguous. I don't know what will happen when i need to join them. Maybe I'll just...

The following code should work.

However, I strongly recommend to rethink the concept of your data storage, especially if you want to join tables based on those values...

Also, you need to...

duplicate post.

discussion already started here .

Please note that the link contains less information than this thread...

If I understand your requirement and your sample data correctly, it can be rephrased as follows:

There is a table holding approx 50k rows, based on a table with 350M rows...

First of all, thank your for providing the sample data! Good job! Made it really easy to work on. 🙂

Following please find a proposal of what I think might help...

Thank your for the table def.

But we'd need some valid sample data as well.

For details on how to do it please follow the link in my signature.

When providing easy to...

Would the following give the expected result?

SELECT DATEDIFF(dd,0,GETDATE())

However, it's interesting that EXCEL returns 40062 for today (2009-09-06), but SQL Server returns 40060...

Nice job, Drew!

I've been trying to simplify it to get rid of the OR condition but couldn't figure it out...

It sounds like my "hint" was misleading... :ermm:

It doesn't really matter what day or time you post a question - there are people around here to help almost anytime!

It's a...

Glad I could help 🙂

But, please think about what Bob told you in his post.

It will really help you in the future (maybe your next post isn't on a Sunday)...

That sounds more like an aggregate function...

I don't recommend to include aggregated values into the table structure you provided since it violates normalization (2NF, IIRC).

Attached please find a proposal using...