Any reason you ignored my question about the -S option?

Where you set the database server and/or instance to use.

This is not a bug. And it is documented in Books Online.

Also see this blog post http://weblogs.sqlteam.com/peterl/archive/2007/09/27/SQL-Server-2005-too-smart.aspx

Books Online here (Transact-SQL, Expressions in queries)

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143359(SQL.90).aspx

Where is the -S option? You have to tell BCP which server to use.

There may actually be more than one instance on same server.

what does your bcp statement look like?

complete command must be on one line.

Your TallyNumbers table must begin with 0 (zero).

Something similar to this, if "random" also mean unique.

The drawback is that the numbers generated per "batch" are similar, but still unique in the batch.

DECLARE@Codes TABLE

(

Code CHAR(8) PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED

)

DECLARE@Sample...

More math on CHECKSUM.

When you calculate the CHECKSUM for a 8-character string you utilizie the full INT (32 bit) without overflowing the cyclic XOR.

It means the checksum for any given...

The checksum can be considered "Good enough".

But you still will have to compensate for the duplicates; ie delete the duplicates and insert 217 new records (in your example), check them...

Or this pseudo code..

INSERT INTO #Temp (Code)

SELECT ... (record count equals the existing number of codes in Codes table plus the new wanted number).

insert into Codes

SELECT TOP (@wantedrecords)

from #Temp AS...

Yes, I have read the previous posts.

But why suggest an alternative that returns an error saying "Sorry mate, couldn't create as many codes as you wanted."

This behaviour wasn't there before...

Try this

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[Codes](

[Code] [char](10) NOT NULL,

CONSTRAINT [PK_Codes] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED

(

[Code] ASC

)WITH (PAD_INDEX = OFF, STATISTICS_NORECOMPUTE = OFF, IGNORE_DUP_KEY = ON, ALLOW_ROW_LOCKS = ON, ALLOW_PAGE_LOCKS = ON, FILLFACTOR =...

It's not the function that takes time here.

It's the LOOP. See this row of code

if ((select count(code) from codes where code = @tempcode) = 0)

For each created code, you COUNT...

Yes. Use the PIVOT operator.

People don't get married anymore and change their name?

Something is very strange!

This post is duplicated 4 times, and cannot be deleted...