One reason might be that you are JOINING on varchar and nvarchar?

Which collation do the temporary table use?

Try

UPDATE

t

SET t.ShortName = w.CODE_VALUE

FROM #TempRecordsToCreate AS t

I am not sure, but that sorting can be made with

SELECT *

FROM SomeTable

ORDER BY RIGHT('   ' + Col1, 3)

or

SELECT *

FROM SomeTable

ORDER BY LEN(Col1), Col1

I don't have to explain why to sort the records this way. It is not my business rule! It belongs to the original poster. Ask him!

Why should I pray?

I don't know, neither do you, if this routine is going to run twice every minute, or only once a month. Not even on how many records that...

Jeff, your performance test took about 1.0-1.5 seconds (absolute precise numbers) on my laptop.

I don't think that is bad for 100 000 records...

I agree with Jeff. Excellent work Bill with both creating a sample set, a clear definition of what you want and also (thumbs up) a complete resultset how you wanted...

Why didn't you time your complete code posted 6/23/2007 12:12:00 AM?

You only timed the last select, not the "normalization part". Why?

And I can't see somewhere that you actually had...

No, I am not.

I am just responding to a need that where posted here. I can't tell why he wants to sort the numbers the way he wanted. Maybe it...

How can you tell?

Are you sure they are not serial numbers? Encrypted values?

We do not simply know and have not enough information to do that assumption.

You are similar to President...

Please demonstrate how you would solve this then!

You just can't tell people to "Normalize your table" when you have absolutely no idea what the data represents.

I would have guessed that...

How would that help?

Try this

SELECT

    StringValue

FROM      ( 

             ...

1) Pass it as XML datatype

2) Pass it as delimeter separated string

3) Wait for SQL Server 2008 (Katmai)

Need RC4 encryption and decryption?

http://www.sqlteam.com/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=76258

Also make sure you have another constraint to check for LUHN algorithm.

See here http://www.sqlteam.com/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=76195 for more information.