Heh... again, I absolutely agree... that makes for some butt ugly  code and I'd personnally never do it that way... Like you, my "Localized...

There is a potential problem in this update... I've seen it lock up servers if parallism is spawned and the indexes are just right... if you need to do a...

Only one way to find out... test it

I'm not sure that's right... lowering the Fill Factor allows more room between items in an index.  Having more "room" might also mean that a page may have to split...

Heh... "What works for them all the time", could break tomorrow...   Then, a new "Localized Best Practice" will be born getting them closer...

I pull more than a half-million rows from Oracle to SQL using a linked server and an INSERT/SELECT in less than 2 minutes... sure you want to stick with DTS?

P.S.  I'll kindly with-hold the lecture about making such mixed character sequences

As much as I love number (Tally) tables, there's absolutely no need for one here... nore is there the need for a bunch of functions, etc.  I don't remember where...

Heh... I agree... but that's not the debate... "It Depends" is not the debate... the debate is "What is the best practice?" and it also seems to be coming "What the...

Heh... I knew it ...  the term "Best Practice" is a bloody Management term ... AND, it...

Like Jackie Chan's Uncle would say "Oh! One more thing"...

I keep a "Tally" table of 11,000 numbers as a permanent table... good for more than 30 years of...

Oh yeah... almost forgot... if you want a nice clustered primary key on both, the test and test results are as follows:

--===== Setup the test environment

    SET NOCOUNT...

If you always want the numbers table to start at 1, this demonstrates both an alternative to the function and a comparison of run times from 10 rows to 10 million rows...

Uh-huh... so... whatcha gonna do with values that could look like this?

SELECT ISNUMERIC('13e05')

SELECT ISNUMERIC('13d05')

Got part way there using a limited triangular join... it spawned 2 times as many rows as the original count of both tables and that's with just a couple of dates... I...