I don’t believe that two wrongs somehow produce a right.  I also think it’s condescending to believe that women and minorities need protection.  That implies that they just can’t make...

It sounds like the design issues with the database are so serious that the ususal source of downtime will be bugs in the application, not hardware, so automatic failover would...

Create a table with one row for each date, and left join that to the result of the join of the other two tables.

Duplicates of what?

It is almost always better to write a date range selection in this form:

where MyDateColumn >=  StartDateTime and MyDateColumn < EndDateTeim

For example, to find all items for the date 2006-01-14.

Select
 *
from
 MyTable
Where
 MyDateColumn...

It's not true that PKZip will not handle files above a ceratin size.

This restriction went away with version 5.0 that was released in 2002.

It is not true that YYYY-MM-DD will work with any dateformat setting, as the following code demonstrates.  The only universal format is YYYYMMDD.

set dateformat ydm
print 'Convert 20071230'
select Date=convert(datetime,'20071230')
print 'Convert 2007-12-31'
select Date=convert(datetime,'2007-12-31')

Results:
Convert...

You could also use a temp table to doe this:

create table #temp
(
MyTableID int  not null primary key clustered,
Counter  int not null identity(1,1)
)

Inset into #temp (MyTableID)
select top 100 percent
 MyTableID
from
 MYTable
order by
 MYTableID

update MYTable
set
 MyCounter = #temp.Counter
from
 MYTable
 join
 #temp
 on MYTable.MYTableID...

For every human problem, there is a neat, simple solution; and it is always wrong

- H. L. Mencken, Mencken's Metalaw

If there something that is preventing you from writing the script that you need?

Since that query has a count(*) in it, it will never return more than one row.

Why do you have to update the values in the identity column?  An ID really should not have any particular meaning, other than to provide a row identifier.

I have to ask.  Why do you have to do this after loading that much data into the table?

This is an even more effective way to get everyone out of the database and prevent them from reconnecting.

alter database MyDatabase set offline with rollback immediate

There is no reason why you couldn't use GETDATE() in your INSERT or UPDATE statement.