As Gail has mentioned it might depend on who is teaching the class.

Here's my take otherwise.

If the main thing you are interested in is learning and getting in-depth knowledge, then...

I understood you to mean that you could have several different ways the manager wants to look at the data. If it is only those 2 then I would...

Please run this against the same database and post on the results:

SELECT @@VERSION AS version,

SERVERPROPERTY('ProductVersion') AS version1,

...

You have to put a ";" before the WITH. It's a little annoying, but it is required. You either have to end the prvious statement before the cte...

This can be done. Here are a couple of tips that should help. Check out the STUFF() function in BOL and lookup Tally table here on SSC. ...

Your options are either to limit the selections the manager has and run a specific stored procedure for each option, return the all the detail data and do all the...

Are you running SQL Server 2005? That statement should work on 2005/2008 against any table. Can you post the actual table structure?

Here's[/url] a GL project on codeplex.

I believe you are getting this error because there is no PK or Unique Index on the table so SSMS can't identify what to delete.

Behind the scenes SSMS is running...

Looks like the error is being returned from the mail server because your mail server limits the size of mail messages. I don't think this is a SQL Server...

Yes the restore to a new or temporary database is the way to do this.

The syntax for restoring a backup to a different database is this:

RESTORE newDatabase FROM DISK='Path to...

Isn't this something that should be handled in the application, not in SQL Server? The application receives an error message or time out message from SQL Server when there...

Jeff has pointed you in the right direction.

Try running with a recompile hint. You might be just re-using the cached plan.

You may want to check out this blog post[/url] by Grant Fritchey as it applies to your query.

What happens if you remove the TOP operator.