Outer joins are not necessarily a bad thing... it's the criteria (or rather, lack of) that is usually responsible for the notorious reputation of outer joins.

Based on the fact that the default is for the Primary Key to get the clustered index and the fact that you're trying to create a different clustered index... I've...

I'm sure that I'm preaching to the choir, but I gotta say it... make sure you have an up to the minute full backup of the database (maybe even a hot...

And, breaking a set of millions of rows up into smaller sets still isn't RBAR...

I wouldn't be surprised if it was a Java or C# batch job running at that time   SQL Scheduled Jobs aren't the only show...

Thanks for the awesome compliment, Kenny... and thanks for the patch to the code!

Yeah... Sorry about that... was thinking about something different and didn't double check.

Whatever... I've been working with SQL Server for 12 years and I've never had to write a cursor.  Yeah, sometimes the occasional While loop in a function (have even gotten...

Thanks, Edward.  Take a look at the above, if you want.

For those that want to play...  

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--      Generate an 8 million row test file. This is NOT part of the solution.  It is...

Heh... I once had a friend that tried to make bottles from broken glass.  That didn't work out so well, either

Thanks for the feedback, Lowell

One more thing... you said the article explains how to save each "field" as SMALLINT.  Even that is...

You didn't answer my other question... are the dashes supposed to be delimiters?

Heh... some of the best (and worst) ideas are spawned on cocktail napkins... this one happens to be one of the worst... if you run it more than once, it...