First, thank you very much for posting your hard earned solution... that's what this forum is all about.

The only problem that I see with your solution...

I've found that the single best improvement you can make in this area is to find and remove all hidden RBAR... "touch" each row only once, if possible, and as...

Another great summary! Great work, Gail.

Yes, but you need to do it through "OSQL". Lookup "OSQL" in Books Online for full details about usage.

Nice blog, Gail...great explanations!

I'll say, "it depends"...

If I'm looking to hire an "entry level" developer, there may be little or no experience to go on in which case education (math background preferred)...

Still, ya gotta admit, Phil... that's 5 times faster... if you make those types of small improvements in many areas of a whole batch that makes multiple passes on a...

Heh... thanks Mike, but you didn't read the code block just before the conclusion 😉 Like Ragu... "It's in there". 😀

Thanks, Chirag. Appreciate the compliment!

What a great way to start the year! Thank you for the awesome compliments, Paul!

Jason! Hey! How's the new job???

I'll bet I know why he wants it... it's probably to find missing ID's in a table. My first reaction would be...

That's what I want to know...

Why on Earth would you want to generate a Billion sequential numbers? That will take 8 gigabytes of space all by itself... it is not practical to do such...

True enough. Just listing options, Adam...

You are correct... makes no significant difference if you only use it once at the beginning of a sproc... unless the sproc is being called millions of times a day...