You're welcome. This was a valuable learning experience for me.

Just in case anyone is curious. There is a follow-up discussion posted here.

FROM SQLSERVER.SourceDatabase.dbo.Employee_Master Employee_Master

INNER JOIN DestinationDatabase.dbo.Prempl Prempl ON CONVERT(int,Employee_Master.Empno) = Convert(int,Prempl.fempno)

WHERE Prempl.fempno IS NULL

What is performance like on the base query, that you say is running? ...

Yes, I know 😀

GROUP BY z.ZipCode, z.CountyName

Zip codes are just convenient distribution areas for the federal postal service. Counties are governmental boundaries defined by the states. ...

It seems to me that this came up in another thread this spring, but I can't recall now whether the functions being compared to their stored proc counterparts were ITVFs...

Yes, there is a world of difference between inline table-valued functions and multi-statement table-valued functions. I believe that stored procedures execute faster than ITVFs, but dang if the...

This is unreliable under SQL2000. See here.

The identity values that are generated depend on the position of the GetIdentity() function in the query tree (showplan), which may...

I can't find any contrary authority to that, and I hadn't realized what parallelism would do to the IDENTITY function, so let's play it safe. Here is a...

Steve is right, sorry I forgot to mention that.

Hey Seth,

From somewhere I got the idea that by using an ORDER BY in the load of data to the temp table, I was in fact making sure the...

You need to examine the final query which is to be executed. It is obviously returning no rows when it runs. I can't see your...

Dave's right. What you are doing is usually done in a stored procedure. You can direct output from the stored procedure to a table using...

You've been watching Johnny Depp in "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" haven't you? 😛

Couldn't test these, but the idea is to make one pass to take your totals and store them in a temp table that has a sequence number you can test....

Even a blind squirrel finds some nuts, Jack. 😀

You say "probably" heaviest, which means you haven't tested it.

Why not set up a test of 100000 inserts into a dummy table and see how much...