Boy, what great timing. I just started an offshoot thread here.

Steve, I really enjoyed the "Manners'' podcast. We all need to be reminded of "The...

No, I haven't looked at this since I realized that my shift-left version was not the ultimate answer. You guys had already made considerable progress, so I've just been...

Sweet. This has certainly been an interesting problem to follow.

Anyone heard from the OP lately?

I quite agree, Vladan. "Backdating" transactions is often a questionable business practice. Although there may be disastrous situations where recovery fails and transactions MUST be entered...

Roy, I'm terribly sorry to hear that. God bless your family in this time of trouble.

Paul, I was referring to your comments about functions which are applied to constants or local variables not having an effect on the use of indexes. (Sorry for...

It's dead, Jim. Wake and afterparty to be held near Roy's place.

I hope you're not trying to change the system time to retrieve rows that had the current getdate() value stored...

Oh, one more thing about the bit datatype. I rarely see a simple active yes/no. Usually it is a "status" column and (A)ctive is but...

Trans54, me see if I can reply in pretty much the same order.

1. Paul is correct that an explicit null can always be passed,...

One other VERY IMPORTANT point that I almost forgot.

The first time you run this procedure, the parameters you pass may have an effect on the execution plan. ...

You're very welcome.

Thought I'd throw in an afternote. I recently read in Karen Delaney's 2005 internals book that when columns are dropped, the space isn't reclaimed until the clustered index...

How about this approach?

DECLARE @EmpXML AS XML(EmployeeSchema)

DECLARE @LocalError -- as what?

BEGIN TRY

SET @EmpXML = @EmployeeXML -- TRY to set the @EmpXML to @EmployeeXML

END ...

AND (@CodeId IS NULL OR @CodeId = 0 OR p.CodeId = @CodeId)

Let's begin with this statement in the WHERE Clause. It will be helpful to interpret it...