Those character strings will CAST or CONVERT directly into smalldatetime, or even implicitly convert.

select CAST('090715' as smalldatetime)

-- implicit conversion

declare @date as smalldatetime

set @date = '090715'

select @date as [@date]

Can you show...

ishaan99 (7/15/2009)

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I have a table which get populated each time a user clicks on a page. This table is only used for running selects and has approx 74 million rows....

I can't send you examples, but the proper terminology for calling external code from SQL is either "EXTENDED Stored Procedure" or "CLR (Common Language Runtime)". I...

I suggested that as an alternative. I assume that in his case, he wants to know the value that doesn't have a dash in it.

But,...

A bit of humor for those of you who own dice with more than six sides.

http://xkcd.com/%5B/url%5D

Can you give us some context please? What problem are you trying to solve. Where did you hear or read the term "SQL Trend Line...

To be very safe, remember to group by year and month, not just by month. Otherwise you will run into problems if your data spans more than...

The ORDER BY wants all values to be of the same datatype. Where you find a '-' in the string for ssid, such that a numeric value is...

Gail, I've heard slow code defended because:

1. "It's more intuitive."

2. "It reads better."

3. "SQL figures all that stuff out."

4. "That's how I...

I wanted to avoid this because of the sheer size of the tables. Frankly, we don't have enough disk space to play with... but what else is...

I'm just trying to add a little room for indoor plumbing, Alvin. 😉

Thanks, Gus, that makes sense to me, even though I was hoping to avoid it.

(First Verse…. I need to get these all in order some day.)

Let me introduce myself, the name’s James T. Kirk.

A Federation starship is the place that I work.

We fly to...

If I do... will that pay for the assistance?

Can anyone who has been through the partitioning wars give me some advice here?