Heh... I rank the term "By Design" and, especially, the term "Operates as Designed" right up there with other "lameties" (to coin a phrase and is similar to the well...

I did the same thing with a similar table, which contains the binary for a WAV file for recorded calls.  It currently contains 91 months (we have to keep everything...

I'm a little bit old fashioned... and a bit of a control freak when it comes to such things, not to mention being a bit anal about formatting and readability...

A better practice would be to create a small "utility" database for such things.

To be honest, though... you don't need a separate table to do comparisons with.  Jobs...

IMHO, there is no totally reliable, unbiased, completely accurate comparison except possibly for the cost of ownership. 
There are a lot of folks that will say that MS has created...

First, yes... I'm aware that the original script for this thread came out over 9 years ago.  It is, however, a timeless problem and there is a rather serious optimization...

Ok.  Here's a test data generator for folks to play with.  I normally use a million rows just to get some clue as to how scalable whatever code is being...