Yes... you can insert the output of a SELECT into a temp table with an IDENTITY column to keep track of which rownumber you are working on.  Then, loop through the...

I think you have it... the only thing that I would change is UNION to UNION ALL since it's not likely that there will be any overlap between the two...

Johann,

Since you're new, the error at lines 24 and 42 was because you cannot have a WHERE clause in an INSERT/VALUE statement.  Sreejith corrected that by changing it to an INSERT/SELECT.

The...

Take a look at Books Online for the OSQL command... the problem is that the default output is set to 80 characters and you must invoke the "-w" parameter with...

I gotta ask the question, again... you do realize that, except for the Developer's Edition, SQL Server must be installed on a Windows Server...?  You've not said that you are actually...

You are not wrong.  Conversely, if you don't want the IDENTITY column to be reset to the SEED value, you must use DELETE, instead.

In that case, why not just update by what's in the MediaID column?  Load the unique media IDs into a temp table (with an autonumbering IDENTITY column) and step through...

Would you post your "adaptation" please?

I suppose there's a way... but, instead, I normally create a temp table with the results of the called proc and then just join to the temp table.

Create the temp...

What's not working?  The only thing I see at a quick glance is that you are trying to insert @@OutID instead of @OutID in the details table.

I ran your original examples on my production box... both execution plans are identical and they both have parallelism. 

Could it be that someone screwed up and turned of auto-calc...

Create the temp table at a higher level in the nest.  Or, use a global ##temp table (only one named instance can live at a time).

The other question would be... how many rows are you updating?  It should only take about 3.5 seconds to update 20k rows.

Emma,

Both Lynn and John solutions will work for finding the duplicates... the question is, what do you want to do with them once you've found them?

It's late and I didn't have a chance to work on this... sorry.

Just to give you a head start, you can mod the code for table name just by replacing...