Did you mean to post this in the 2008 forum? If so, I tested your script on a 2008 database and it ran just fine. I'm not sure where the...

I found Itzik Ben Gan's course on advanced TSQL very helpful. He covered all the new TSQL functionality in great depth. He's from Solid Quality Mentors.

Have you performance tested both approaches? I think the CTE approach, especially the second one, not mine, should be much more effecient than loading data into a temp table.

Automatic verification of changes to the scripts as you save them is a pretty large advantage. Refactoring object names is great. The Static Code Analysis is getting a lot more...

If you can pass the data in as XML, you can use the XQUERY language in 2005 to pull the data out of it, exactly like a table. It looks...

Most of the time, cursors just flat out run too slow. Rewriting the procedures to avoid the use of cursors is usually the best bet. Other than that, I'm not...

This white paper from Microsoft is one of the best sources for this information.

Itzik is the greatest.

It sounds as if you're doing some sort of data migration. If you can, you should look into, in some way, turning this into a bulk load....

The long answer is: it depends.

Let's assume that the 8 column table is supposed to be retained in it's entirety and that you're supposed to create that, load it, and...

As you've already seen, no they're not both the same. Yes, the number of physical reads is the same, but you'll find that this procedure recompiles, a lot, probably every...

How about using a CTE within a UNION query. Something like this:

WITH MyCTE AS

(SELECT SalesOrderId

,row_number() over (order by TotalDue DESC) AS TotalRank

,TotalDue

FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader)

SELECT TOP 5 *

FROM MyCTE

UNION

SELECT *

FROM MyCTE

WHERE SalesOrderId...

This seriously sounds like a highly questionable approach.

However, if you really want to do it, you need to use dynamic SQL:

DECLARE @mySQL nvarchar(max)

SET @mySQL = 'SELECT ' + @Column...

But if you were using SMO as a code generation utility, it wouldn't matter that you had to use the name would it? I mean if we assume that you...

I've done it both ways. The one recommendation I can make is to make this consistent with the rest of the system. If the system is using artificial and invisible...

I'm sorry. I really don't know at this point. We use this all the time and it works just fine.