500 COLUMNS????

Not sure this is what you are looking for... but I don't think you find a more dramatic difference...

DECLARE @Counter   INT      --Just a loop counter

DECLARE @BitBucket INT      --Just...

Perhaps I'm doing something wrong, Joe... the T-SQL example you posted (repeated below), generates the sequence of numbers that follows that and repeats... not random at all...

CREATE TABLE...

Different take... traded in a little bit of the simplicity and speed of Lynn's and Jason's methods for some flexibility so far as a programmable interval and the ability to...

I'm thinking it's a test question...

--===== If you have a table that looks like this...
 CREATE TABLE yourtable
        (
        RowNum INT IDENTITY(1,1) PRIMARY KEY,
        SomeString VARCHAR(100) NULL
        )
GO
--===== Add a constraint that looks like this
  ALTER...

Understood.... just wanted you to know that the computed column would do the same and is just about as fast (can even be indexed if the formula is deterministic)... it...

What is the Primary Key for the Orders table and where does Code come from?

Probably stating the obvious, but now you have a column that can get out of sync with the date if the dates change.  It would be better if you removed...

Nicely said and I agree 100%!  Only thing I wouldn't do is change the Temp Tables back to Table Variables... Q3 and Q4 in the following link are the reason...

Oh yeah... been thinking about that.  Upgrading at work is going to be a bugger and rumor has it that MS is going to stop "supporting" 2000 sometime in August...

Outstanding... thanks Grant!

Finally... someone else who believes in readability of code!

Heh... you and I are on the same page... that's the "magic" I was referring to... sorry I misread your previous post on the subject.

Yep, made the correction on the...

Haven't done any million row testing but the use of DATEPART may be faster because it uses integer math instead of string comparisons... I just didn't want to have to...