Funny - I could have sworn I was reading the SQLSERVERCENTRAL boards, not the TOO CUCKOO FOR COCOA PUFFS chat line....

Black hawks, roaming missile, WMD,  the men in black on...

It's not the data entry - it's answering the "questions" that derive from this kind of data model that will continue to haunt you.

The purpose for data of this sort...

File this under the "no such thing as top floor" category.

We had a disaster of sorts at my previous occupation.  They hospital system I worked for had taken great pains...

This might be considered "cheating" but the most straightforward way is to extract one row per "unique" set, blow everything out and rebuild:

--find the unique file names and extract them...

Views and stored procedures aren't interchangeable.  You can do a LOT more in SP's than you cannot do within a view, so the question is a "trick" one to answer (As...

Well, yes - anything that pulls more data than is needed is going to run slower than something that pulls just what is needed (and if not slower to pull -...

My first question would be - WHY??????  Binary perhaps, but decimal?

MAC addresses CAN't be converted to integer (Int).  Int is too small of a data type for that (MAC is...

That's one of the "tricky" things to remember about DTS when you schedule it: there are two contexts, one for you connecting to it and editing the job, and the...

Technically - the select * syntax is functionally similar to having TWO queries.  (meaning the execution plan has to do two things instead of one). The first one has to...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-tree

How it's used is reasonably well described here:

http://www.semaphorecorp.com/btp/algo.html

I saw your post and went looking for some trace of this...  I'd love to see it.  If you should happen to dig it up - please share!

 Try changing this (look for the red):

CREATE FUNCTION Cupid

(

@Date_of_birth datetime, @Star_sign Varchar(50), @Weight INT, @Smoking_habit

I'd agree with your assessment - with the exception of it being set-based.  Something that grows at least linearly with the size of the data, requiring you to touch everything...

You're missing my point.  Jeff's method isn't Set-based either.  It's using a SEQUENCE (a list with an ORDER), which is a vastly different concept.  The calculation HAS to be done for...

Hmm... I guess that part of the response got chopped off.

What Jeff Said!