I'm not sure what they did, but our DBA's setup a system of alerts that sends them email on their "crack berry" if a CPU spikes for more than a minute or...

Sreemati,

Most of the suggestions folks have given so far in this thread are spot on...

I'd like to add that you must change your thinking, as well.  You must stop...

Rudy, where's that list you and I came up with many moons ago?  I think step #1 was something like "Write good set based code"...

Charlie...

Dunno if you can do anything about it, but it's "Death by SQL" to store dates and time as NVARCHAR (ESPECIALLY WITH THE DAY OF THE BLOODY WEEK!!) instead of...

You could put a trigger trigger on the table that counts the rows in the table... could be either an AFTER trigger that deletes what's been inserted once it hits...

no_return should actually be no_output and, in this case, it will be of NO_HELP...  no_output is part of xp_cmdshell and it just means not to display any output it may...

>>Margalit- you may want to identify yourself as the Product Manager for DBMaestro.

It DID sound like a shameless plug... now I know why... almost as bad as spam but lower....

Aw heck... let's continue the corruption to the max... give it an sp_ prefix and drop it into Master

Are you sure it's not just ASCII?

Mostly, because it's just not allowed... read the following from Books Online...

Rules for Regular Identifiers

The rules for the format of regular identifiers are dependent on the database compatibility level, which...

I think the point here is that it doesn't appear that they're teaching such basics anymore.

Eyes must be strained a bit... just can't find that anywhere in your original post.

Please tell me you didn't just publish the real login/password to your site...

I agree with Serqiy on this one... your code is better if you don't use a UDF here.

In SQL 2005, you can use GETDATE() in a UDF... you can also...

Ok... let's say you do want an explicit transaction for that... where's the error check and rollback code that should go with it?