You want to normalize the data as much as you need to. There really isn't a "too far" or a "not far enough." Meet the business requirements in the best...

Using cursors at all is frequently a poor choice to solve a problem. However, if you have to use two cursors, use two cursors. Declare both, open both, parse through...

Are you kidding? I skip the ones that I know I don't know and I'm still only batting about 58%. Lighten up on yourself just a bit.

Great editorial. Thanks for putting it out there.

We're in the early stages of design for a new project and we were honestly counting on a number of features in 2008...

It would work for string comparisons though, but a case insensitive database wouldn't need to force the strings to all UPPER case in any regard. It doesn't address the...

Yeah, I noticed this morning that I didn't have it quite right. I'd joined against the table, but I didn't also provide criteria for the column. Sorry about that. How's...

I'm not sure why you're getting the collation errors. One of the columns must be marked differently. How about this as a query:

select p.name

...

That's elapsed time on the client then. Have you looked at the execution plans?

Sorry, I didn't read the whole post (again).

That is odd. Where are you measuring the time elapsed, the server or the client?

Have you looked at the execution plan? Maybe most...

Probably because most of the time is spent in martialing the rows of data, not particular columns.

The problem with dynamic queries is that they can lead to recompiles and poor plan reuse. While they solve some problems, they can introduce others.

Imke Cronje (1/28/2008)

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Am busy running DBCC ShowContig at the moment. Taking quite long.

Checked out execution plan and its shows this:

Query Cost (relative to batch) : 100%

Estimated Operator Cost: 99...

Basically the case statement is resolving either to 1 or 0. If it's 1, then 1=1 at the end of the case statement. If it's zero, then 0 certainly does...

And the execution plan?

Plus, how often does the index get rebuilt or the statistics get updated?

Further, since as you say this isn't your database, if the owner has set up security appropriately, you probably won't have DDL permissions.