This will not produce the results you expect if there is a tied date for any give Job/Status combo... nor is it very good on really large tables.  But it...

Sure... can be done in any language... I just got bogged down at work.

A woman's sister dies of supposedly natural causes. The woman goes to her sister's funeral. During the funeral, she sits next to a man who consoles her quite nicely...

"One measurement is worth a thousand speculations"

Mathew,

Index Scans are NOT always a bad thing... here's proof (and a couple o' tricks)...

First, let's make a million row test table...

--=====...

Recommend rewriting the following using a derived table with a proper join instead of the correlated sub-query that you have...

and sc.CONF_id =

(select max(sc2.CONF_id)

from sep_CONF sc2 , main_score es2...

Thanks, Gail

Ah... I see what you're getting at...

Yes, in that case, if the inserted row size is greater that than free size remaining on the target page due to a clustered...

Nah... this one...   One individual had a devil of a good time leading others on just for the sake of a good bar room brawl.  I rather enjoyed...

Cool... thanks, Michael. 

Yeah, clearing the cashe didn't seem to matter in my testing so I didn't include it in my code.  And, I very much like the idea of using...

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...