I run a quick test in QA and it looks like a single derived table is faster.

In my test db neither family nor givennames are indexed. It also has a...

Cool I'll have to test that. I would have assumed otherwise.

I would have assumed the derived table would use an index seek to get the records and then all the...

I think its what makes sqlservercentral.com such a great forum. Everybody is so willing to debate all aspects of a problem.

I have rarely had to wait more the...

Chris, Is the union faster then using a CASE in the derived table?

select foo.FullName from

(Select case when lname like 'A%' then lname + ', ' + fName when fName...

What a funny thread.

Sure there are plenty of ways to deal with it and all depend on what the needs and environemnt are.

If somebody asks a formating question one can...

granted but if there are many clients (types) and the formating wants to be enforced enterprise wide...

Beautiful!

I use case statements but I hadn't thought of using them that way, equal to itself...I can hardly wait to see if it works as expected!

What datatype is the field? Maybe you should simply set it to 'money'

Thanks for that MidwestDBA. I think that encourages me enough to at least do an experiment using the whole dataset. I'll configuring it with partitioning first and run some queries...

Weird I just wrote about 5 paragraphs but you are all saved from reading it all because I hit post and it all dissappeared. So this time just the facts.

~50gb...

Almost all the queries include a date range so if it coould be a calculated constraint like

tbl1: date dateadd(m,-12,getdate())

Then that what would...

Thanks for the advice, I think I will avoid the partitioning. I really don't need the overhead and the benefits are iffy compares to the boost I'll get from teh...

I setup this tool but I was after more frequent collection of performance counters for overall sytem health (System, ASP, etc). I think I set it for hourly collection...

Thanks guys, I just double checked and the example I was working from online was NOT from MS SQL Doh!

I always have a hard time remembering the syntax for an...

I agree that your associated (User/Note) table is the way to go.

If each note is being assigned to a large number of users, perhaps a group system could...