That's exactly what I was talking about... if you "convert the two columns", you destroy most opportunities to use an index if one is available.  The method I displayed allows...

Thanks, Paul... I appreciate the feedback.

Rambling on a bit... If you consider that dates are nothing but underlying numbers that represent the number of whole and fractional days since midnight,...

TheDate column would also make a good clustered key candidate...  see my last post immediately above for how to get around the "joining with time" problem... it's a very common...

Sure... it's a very common request... and most folks do it the wrong way, in my opinion... they'll write some nasty (or nice) index killing formula in the WHERE clause of their...

Yep... spot on... couple of us have "Auxilliary Date Tables" that span many years to answer questions like what's the 2 Thursday of July of year xxxx, etc, etc.  Between...

Sure... but let's just say you're storing the bitmap as 16 bits (using any of a couple of methods)... what do you have to do if you add a 17th...

... and now everyone knows why I asked four times what the heck the EXE was doing!

First, I gotta say, it sounds...

Rather than denormalizing with a bit-wise operator, why not just make a simple normalized table of Holidays with the region code?

...and I guess the words "formatted code" just aren't in your dictionary, huh?

I think you're the same guy from the "other" forum that asked the same question.... if I recall correctly, you will actually receive two 500GB files from your client.  That...

...and, still, we don't know what the EXE is doing...

Nope... it's likely a batch job to be run only one batch at a time... but I do get your point.

Must be a difference in boxes we're running on... I don't come up with your's being 3 times faster, but the point about the WHILE loop method is still well...

Z'actly...

Very cool... and, now you know why I wait a day or two before adding anything to the script library   Nice job,...