Sihaab, thanks for posing an interesting topic. This was thought-provoking for me. One thing I'm curious about is how the optimizer would be expected...

Be advised that UNION ALL will only help you if the header/trailer rows have identical layouts. The whole header/trailer idea is totally alien to the way SQL...

Dynamic SQL is likely your best bet. You can use however many values are in your table to generate parts of your WHERE clause. ...

Just some peanuts from my section of the gallery. I'm not sure how I vote yet.

I think we all agree that it's a good thing to be able...

Given that the question is a beginner's question, I think its safe to assume that reading execution plans isn't something Neliii is prepared to do yet.

Nelliii, please read Jeff's article...

If you only have READONLY permissions to a database, you can't create objects in the DB. In the future, talk to your DBA about your needs before you...

It's highly possible that the interview question was simply designed to draw out your knowledge of views and stored procedures. If I was conducting an interview and...

Sometimes you can make code literally hundreds and sometimes thousands of times faster simply by dividing the code up and maybe storing an interim answer in a Temp table. You...

Views are more flexible, because you can query them for subsets of rows and columns just like tables. On the other hand, I've seen disasters where developers used...

afaik? = "As far as I know?"

thin question authors

certificated

Just a thought. You still have to do the second step where you update the rows that matched the keep condition. Read up on the MERGE...

Like table names in a SELECT statement, the audit specification name probably can't be a variable.

Try doing this with dynamic SQL instead.

I assume your function is returning an integer, so I will ask why you can't define the incrementing column in the destination table as an IDENTITY column. I...