Why?  My last solution has no SELECT whatsoever...

I guess that's where I was going with that, David... I'm trying to stay away from the sub-query and it came out wrong.

If the ROWLOCK,HOLDLOCK works to keep the PK violations out, that'll work... I was peeling 1 potato at a time   How's the deadlock...

I'm trying to stay away from SELECT at all, Serqiy...

I stand corrected.  Thanks David.

Nice, but if you ever end up with 3 entries for a property, your method won't work.

But, this will...

 SELECT MAX(ID) AS...

Greg,

It would appear that your TimeIn column could have the following formats...

6:15 a.m.

12:15 p.m.

6:15 p.m.

12:15 a.m.

The periods in the "a.m." and "p.m." could make this a bugger to convert.  Even...

The way you indent on this forum is to use leading spaces or use the "Increase Indent" tool at the top of the message box when you are creating your...

Ok, Lisa... you just assumed that I knew you were talking about the "other" code in your rule of thumb and I thought you were talking about the code I submitted...

1. The order will almost always be determined externally to this expression anyway, since unless you can guarantee < 12 months and all in the same calendar year you might...

Ian,

Nice job at producing the return that the original poster actually asked for... there is one little problem... you cannot include the ELSE clause that you have or you get...

Even though their occurance is really unacceptable, deadlocks are about as normal (I didn't say "as frequent") as regular locking anytime you have both a SELECT and an UPDATE in the...

I'm thinking that formatting the message is much less important that formatting the code for readability...  It only took about ten minutes to...

Forgot something else... if you parameterize the table name for the small names table, you can pass a parameter to use different name tables... that will allow you some extreme...

You might also want to remember that the minimum resolution for the DateTime data type is 3 milliseconds, not 2 as posted in the original code.