The table lock was an attempt to fix a previous deadlock - on the assumption that the queries were locking different groups of rows and then needing to grab more.

There...

Thanks for the response. I executed the queries in SSMS to obtain the actual execution plans (see attached) and they both had Degree of Parallelism  = 1. The tables involved...

Lordy.  I understand...

We still use CHAR in places where the length is fixed, eg. Sedol, ISIN, 2 and 3 character ISO codes for countries, currencies, etc. We also used CHAR(5) for our...

Hardcoding as a sin is all well and good, but what do you do in the case of a date-from-date-to pair of columns? When all entries but the last...

You don't need to create a temp table and join to it. You can have the query in a stored procedure that has a parameter which is a "user defined...

• This reply was modified 5 years, 2 months ago by Chris Wooding.
• This reply was modified 5 years, 2 months ago by Chris Wooding.

My daily commute was around 2.5 hours. The alarm still goes of at the normal time because my wife has to go into work (in a school), so I ended...

Thanks Jeffrey, I've corrected my sample code.

I agree with Jeffrey that the most likely cause is that someone has created an additional address record for the affected customer.

The pattern we use for a similar process is this.

MERGE INTO final_table
USING (SELECT key_column_1
            , key_column_2
...

• This reply was modified 5 years, 3 months ago by Chris Wooding.

I've used BEGIN DISTRIBUTED TRANSACTION. I've got a control table in one database that is kept in line with a copy in another database via a linked server.

Having looked through the "people that have been fired" article, I can say I agree with the outcome in almost every case.

I agree with your point about not being too concerned with titles. In my career I've been a programmer, senior programmer, analyst programmer, senior analyst programmer, data engineer and senior...

Are you able to amend the file layout at all? It may be better to push the problem back to COBOL by adding record no. as a field and getting...

I would say; take the time to learn what your employer does. Many of us in IT work in the IT department of companies whose business is something else entirely....