Nice gesture... but a really, really bad thing to do...

I think you mean that trailing spaces are neglected...

Spot on, Serqiy!

Documentation? ... ... Documentation??? ... ... DOCUMENTATION!!!!  Now THAT's what I'm talkin' 'bout!!!

Very nicely done, Alain!

Didn't know SAP made a version for SQL Server... that's cool.  Gotta look that one up.

Then you can write a stored procedure that figures all that out (provided CATEGORY is used in a normalized fashion) and DTS the results of the stored procedure or put them...

Yep... no database should ever be set to autogrow by 10% including TempDB... Estimate the maximum size you'll need for the next six months (or a year), add 20%, and...

Not entirely clear on what you want to do... do you have data in SQL Server that you want to spool out in a similar fashion?  In other words, where...

If you use Enterprise Manager to join many tables with outer joins, it will frequently produce both LEFT and RIGHT outer joins.  It will also, on occasion, produce joins that...

If all of this is happening in an explicitly declared transaction, that would be the source of your problems.

And then, examine the code... most performance problems have nothing to do with the hardware and sometimes not even with indexes.  Got cursors?  Got WHILE loops?  Got views with aggragate...

PLEASE... take the time to show some data before and after the function gets done with it... it sounds like you want a table function but we can't tell for...

David's solution is almost correct, but not quite... the resolution for DATETIME datatypes is 3 milliseconds... David's solution rounds up to midnight... you need to do this instead...

SELECT...

Concur... and, if you do it right, don't even need that... the "External Data Ranges" can be setup to "auto-magically" refresh on open.  In Excel 2k3 and above, you can...

No, but press the {f8} key in query anlyzer to reveal the "tree"... drill down to the table you want, right click on it, and read the menu that appears......