I think you need to first answer the question:

How do you know what the first sellable item of stock to be sold is ?

If you start from an empty warehouse...

You will need the techniques described here

http://www.simple-talk.com/sql/performance/set-based-speed-phreakery-the-fifo-stock-inventory-sql-problem/

As explained above , & is a bitwise AND operation.

What are you expecting the result to be (and why ) ?

Nope.

The only way to guarantee order is by using the ORDER BY clause ,...

Ill Pencil you in for Ver2 😉

Yup, got a few people already looking over it now...

Loop unrolling - ie Cursor removal. Pretty high level stuff.

Any volunteers to read through a draft of an article for me ?

Thanks....

Ok , thanks for clarifying

Hmm , not sure if ive understood the problem correctly as im seeing different results...

But , just to add to the discussion ....

A couple of sorts im not to happy...

Yes , very sneaky 🙂

Ok , so that shouldn't be a problem....

Getting back to the original issue though , although there may be X millions rows , how many unique...

Im speaking from a point of pure ignorance about your code, ie i havent run in through, 😉 , but

WHILE @@ROWCOUNT=3

So , you are inserting 3 rows...

mister.magoo (1/24/2011)

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Dave - Good point, thanks - do you think SQL will ever Parallelise (?) a while loop - not that I am arguing against MAXDOP 1, just curious as...

Ingenious use. 🙂

One word of warning though set MAXDOP 1 , scope_identity can return incorrect results in a parallel query.

some methods are discussed here

http://www.projectdmx.com/tsql/tblnumbers.aspx