Here's another way

create procedure FindPeople

@Firstname varchar(30) = '',

@LastName varchar(30) = '',

@Title varchar(5) = ''

AS

Select title, first_name, surname

from person

where first_name LIKE ISNULL(@FirstName,'') + '%'

  and last_name LIKE ISNULL(@LastName,'') + '%'

  and title LIKE ISNULL(@Title,'') +...

So many ways to skin a cat.

How about one of my least favorite ways. (Found this in my production system when I...

Becaust I want to be explicit about round off vs truncate fractions.

Picky, picky. Close enough. The second 2 ints are treated like a fractional value (select getdate()+0.25)

How is a float stored? (

If the sort order requested is the same as the clustered sort order, would it now save processing time if the sorting on that column is avoided?

If you do...

Or my personal favorite way

DECLARE @dt DATETIME

SET @dt = '2005-12-22 14:22'

SELECT CAST(FLOOR(CAST(@dt AS FLOAT)) AS DATETIME)

Takes advantage of the fact that a date is stored like a float, with the time...

Has the number of text files or size thereof increased recently?

What happens if you invoke the application manually from the OS, not from SQL?

There may be a limitation that you can't allow CASCADE update or delete when an identity column is involved.  Look for that.

There's no problem defining a cascading update/delete if the...

That would be because SQL's trying to insert the string value 'getDate()' into a datetime field. Bulk insert just puts data into a table. It won't check to see if...

CityId inthe Title table and TitleId in the city table. Isn't that a circular reference?

And if those aren't the real tables, please post the real table definitions.

Have a look at the microsoft certification site. There's good info there on the certifications that will be available for SQL 2005 and the exams that comprise them

http://www.microsoft.com/learning/mcp/default.asp

I use SharpReader (http://www.sharpreader.net/index.html) It's a standalone app. It has occational problems with the corperate firewall/proxy, but nothing serious.

Please post this in the performance forum, rather than here. This forum is just for discussions of the question of the day.

There could be a thousand reasons for slow performance -...

That sound like a pretty insane table design. What's wrong with storing all the data in one table with a date column? 

From what I read on the MS training site, the only upgrade exam will be to upgrade MCDBA to the new MC IT Professional: Database Administrator, so unless you have...