Other queries did top/bottom 10% of the whole table which is why you got such a disparity in rows... Serqiy's does it correctly by the key column...

When you say the tables have "no indexes on them", I'm hoping that you at least have a primary key   If not, you...

Part of the problem with table variables is they do not nor can they be made to use statistics... table variables should be kept relatively short... changing to a temp...

Or, just set if to off... won't produce an error if it's already off.

Thanks, Andy...

That's the ticket... Thanks, Lynn.

Heh... melted the filter...

Dearest Moderator's,

How can I make it so I'm no longer "watching" (unsubscribe) this topic?   We've gone from "Banker's Rounding" to actual "Digital Truncation"...

Oh, bugger... I forgot about the check constraint thingy... Andy, I've temporarily lost my mind and my notes... can you review/provide a brief summary how the check constraints improves the performance...

It depends...

How many stocks do you need to do this for and how often?  Very well may be better to do it...

Recommend you write a macro to export the section of the spreadsheet as a tab or comma delimited text file and import the text file.

EXEC (@CMD)

I'll take Ray's suggestion 1 step further... Don't let the developer's even see the production database... create a developer's database as a "snapshot" of production, give them dbo privs to...

Dunno how it works in 2k5, but in 2k, you could open Enterprise Manager, right click on a table and select "Design Table"... the "Description" for each column is where...

SQL Server doesn't know how to spell "mapped drive"... you're stuck with the UNC approach... which isn't so bad... don't have to worry about the drive letter ever changing