lmeinke,

I see where you added the sales_rank column but I don't see how that adversely affects the results. So let's modify the final select slightly.

CREATE TABLE #SalesByEmployeeCategory

(Category VARCHAR(100)

...

The thing about the Quirky Update is that it's, well... quirky.

Sometimes you'll need to play with it a might to get the results you expect.

I'll look at this again but...

:hehe: It will tend to do that the way I fudged the grouping factor.

Just goes to show that thorough test data is the best way to a good solution.

What about...

As the holiday season rapidly approaches, I'd like to take a minute to wish everyone on this forum a Merry Christmas and very happy New Year.

The first anniversary of my...

I can try. 😉

The ORDER BY is split into two levels:

1. First the characters, which get assigned the empty string when the value is a numeric (which will sort before...

Not very elegant but you might be able to use something like this, assuming your intent is to sort numbers first as numbers followed by non-numeric characters:

CREATE TABLE #varchar_field1 (...

Actually I didn't check the byte-size difference - that...

Chris-475469 (12/17/2012)

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It's more an issue of we asked the developers to use datetime2 going forward. The precision isn't really an issue.

It looks like we'll be having another discussion on datetime...

Chris-475469 (12/17/2012)

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Its annoying because it means we'd have to cast or convert every datetime2 date that could appear on the spreadsheet(s).

The developers will argue it'd be quicker to change the...

Personally I've never tried it but a quick test of this:

SELECT CAST('2012-01-01' AS DATETIME2)

If you copy/paste the result into Excel it can be formatted as a date with nor problem.

As...

DataAnalyst011 (12/17/2012)

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Again this is really helpful. I hope you all won't mind a follow-up question:

What is the difference between...

WHERE [column] IN ([subquery])

and

WHERE EXISTS ([subquery])

?

I've been trying to read on...

Another way:

DECLARE @spitme TABLE (Item varchar(40));

INSERT @spitme VALUES ('HEYE-B Euro-IPA 69793'), ('HEYE-B RFE-IPA 70940');

SELECT STUFF(STUFF(Item, 1, CHARINDEX(' ', Item), ''), CHARINDEX(' ', STUFF(Item, 1, CHARINDEX(' ', Item), '')), LEN(Item), '')

FROM...

If you think those "typos" that pass SQL Server's parser seem weird, try this one:

SELECT 7+$

Obviously this is some sort of diabolically silly test of your knowledge of windowing functions:

create table #TestTask1 (Name varchar(1), Territory Varchar(1), sales_amount int);

insert into #TestTask1 values ('A','X',100)

insert into #TestTask1 values...

lmeinke (12/17/2012)

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dwain.c (12/14/2012)

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lmeinke (12/14/2012)

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Steve,

I was actually replying to dwain c. but I do thank you as well. I was out of the office for a few days and didn't...