You can replace the CASE statements with the NULLIF() function. You would do:

NullIF(@variable, '')

There are a lot of articles and blog posts out there about this topic. My gut is telling me that this database was not originally in SIMPLE mode and...

Check out this article:

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/tamestrings6/263/

If you have the commands in separate steps the second step should not start until the first step completes. Unless there is a bug because of multiple processors...

The SIMPLE recovery model does the truncate log on checkpoint. Truncate Log on Checkpoint was removed in 2000 and replaced by the SIMPLE recovery model. So you would...

If you look at the execution plan you can see that in the query using ORDER BY 1 the SORT takes place AFTER the Compute Scalar operation, which I assume...

There is no way in SQL Server to enforce that a non-null value is passed to parameter. You would need to verify the values within the stored procedure or...

Here's one way to do it:

[font="Courier New"]IF EXISTS(SELECT * FROM dbo.orders WHERE order_id = @order_id)

   BEGIN

       INSERT INTO DuplicateOrders

           SELECT

               VALUES

   END

ELSE

   BEGIN

       IF EXISTS(SELECT * FROM dbo.representatives WHERE representative_id...

nkm has the right idea. The other thing you need to consider is that you have a "bad" value in the text file. Something like 20080631, as there...

Your first point is valid and your second point is valid, but a bit nit-picky as the second ";" does no harm and because most SQL Server developers are not...

You should be able to as long as the smtp server will allow anonymous connections.

Check out this article, http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/TSQL/62867/. It contains a great method for parsing a string in the Stepping through Characters section about halfway down.

I'm assuming you mean my rationale for lower case with "_" (I have to hit shift for the "_").

As I said since I use a case insensitive collation...

You should definitely backup your system database (master, model, msdb).

The closest thing you will get is to not use spaces or reserved words in table and column names. My personal opinion is to that table names should be...