Have you verified that you are getting an empty string from the app? Are you sure youare getting data back to the app? I would change the if...

I just assumed the temp table represented the master table for example and testing purposes.

At the Orlando PASS meeting last night, Jeff Garbus did his Indexing for Performance talk and he said something that made sense and relates to this. I probably won't...

Matt's solution is more efficient than mine. I thought about using a CTE, but have not used them enough to be comfortable. If you set statustics IO on...

Is the column you are inserting into smalldatetime or datetime? Are you getting an overflow error? I have seen problems because of bad dates in legacy systems like...

Can you post what you want the final result to look like?

This may relate a littel to Arthur's comment about loading to another RDBMS or from another RDBMS or even another server. If you are loading from a system that...

Wow, no anti-identity post yet. I like identity for all the reasons mentioned thus far. I also agree that there are times when an identity column is not...

Charles Kincaid (1/29/2008)

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I'm not a big fan of MERGE. I much prefer REPLACE INTO. You code everything one way. It looks just like a regular INSERT statement...

I agree that the MS marketing is horrible, I also think a 2-3 year release cycle is too fast. How are DBA's and developers supposed to keep up with...

Did you check to see the type of locks being taken by the 2 methods? Were there any differences in locking that would mitigate the improvement based on fewer...

Definitely be truthful, but as others have said avoid being negative about people. The last time I was voluntarily looking (the last time I was looking was due to...

DB_Newbie2007 (1/25/2008)

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Just in case anyone is interested:

My query using all of the derived tables took 1 hour, 13 minutes to run.

Mark's query using the group/having clause took 14...

I have submitted to pre-employment drug and criminal background checks and have no problem with either. I also have been randomly drug tested as well.

I personally think drug testing...

First I would write a simple .NET service that monitors the directory where the XML is located and loads the XML into the database and then archives the file. ...