Another good reason for learning it is so you can "ban" it... I don't mean "not use it", either... I mean import the data into nice normailzed tables... storing the...

If the Boss wants it real bad... he/she can have it that way (real bad)   Good luck.

Does anyone out there use schema binding for a function?  I'd be real interested in knowing any performance benfit you may have seen...

Almost forgot... you can schedule a job to run every five minutes on the target server to look in the directory for where you place the file... when it sees...

BCP to native format... BCP or Bulk Insert from native format... only requires BULK ADMIN role privs... not SA.  Nasty fast...

GREAT answer... I'd also add that I'd avoid views of views (can become a little memory intensive, more difficult to trouble shoot, and if written incorrectly, will need one view...

Sure... until you have to do a calculation with both... then, as Remi suggested, it won't be possible to use an index even if both columns are indexed.

Just as a...

As suggested, do a search on this forum... there's a particullarly good and nasty fast function to calculate Work Days (week days,...

An it's pronounced like the steel rod that but in concrete... ree-bar... (translation... steel stick in the mud

No... but it sounds like you have... what'd ya come up with?

IMHO, views of views are a bit like writing functions that call functions... they sure seem useful until you need to troubleshoot...

Or... rewrite the stored procedure to be setbased instead of RBAR.

I just love it when they don't  

Very cool... thank you.

I did a bunch of experiments on several different machines (desktop, 4 cpu server, 8 cpu server, etc) about 9 months ago and the results are posted somewhere on this...