We still don't have a clue how long this job may last, Bill. 

Mary,

Lowell's code is great but, as he said, there's a bit of a performance problem... takes about 4 and a half minutes to return 100,000 rows.  The following function is about...

The problem is that c.Text is an NVARCHAR column of 4000... don't forget that this is UniCode and contains 2 bytes per visible character so it's really 8k if the...

Karthik,

You didn't believe me?

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/forums/shwmessage.aspx?forumid=8&messageid=395872#bm396072

If tempdb is growing well beyond what you think it should, check the code for Cursors and improper use of temp tables.

How big is your tempDB MDF getting?

Ah... I see...

Part of the problem is that both DELETE's and INSERTS are logged so you seem to have a lot of unnecessary logging.  The use of TRUNCATE would be...

Cool... thanks for the feedback, Jim.

Dunno... could be anything... can you post the INSERT and DELETE code?

You're missing the point, Uzwa... From the data examples you have in the first post, what do you want the output to look like?

Karthik,

Now THAT's a horse of a different color!   The example you posted is for "Flow Control" and there's not much you can do...

Karthik,

Yes... as David suggested, RDBMS's are designed for "set based" use.  It's the nature of the beast.  By definition, each column should only contain one type of attribute (LastName, for...

What I was getting at is if the source is from a GUI, you must have 3 fields... 1 each for Month, Day, and Year and each field must have...

Are the database properties setup to automatically shrink the database?

Bill,

Is this full time or not?  What are the terms of employment?  Any chance of telecommute?  And, without giving up the ghost, what discipline is the company... banking, telecom, or...

I'm just going to hazard a guess and say that no one has been able to figure out your requirements... Any chance of...