Just to clarify , do you want to delete all but one of these rows ?

You dont need to know XML. It really has nothing to do with it , it's just a handy cheat to concatenate strings.

Take a look at Books Online

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms130214.aspx

I dont wish to be rude , but if that is causing you troubles you really need to go on a course.

Generally i try to 'teach a man to fish'.

But really, come on give it a try.....

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic746875-49-1.aspx

By using the case statement

select ....,case when money >=10000 then 'A' else 'B' end as Grade

from ....

If you expand your seqno list the yes, but you will still have an upper limit.

The XML method is the best in terms of performance. Its not without problems...

Lynn's response above should be exactly what you need.

The link i gave also describes this method.

Hi, heres a link to get you started

http://www.simple-talk.com/sql/t-sql-programming/concatenating-row-values-in-transact-sql/

I would imagine that putting an index on the email column would do nothing but help with the performance as, internally, it will already have a ordered list to base...

ifila (7/2/2009)

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I do have a couple of questions. While testing Jeffrey's solution, is there any way to make it run quicker ?

It took 35 minutes to process 600 000 records...

Scalar udfs are generally quite slow and should be avoided.

Try to isolated the issue , what is performance like if you make it a sequential count ?

Also i notice that...

How do you mean 'next' is this is a cursor ?

you could use row_number() (partition by .....) to detect the 'duplicates'

Exactly, a fundamental misunderstanding. Do not view a sqlTable as a nice ordered list , think of it more of a haystack of data. When you select...

Hi , you have a fundamental misunderstanding , there is no 'top' and there is no 'bottom', if you need something to happen in a specific order you have...