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...

Shoot... I was getting ready to post the answer and saw that Ramesh had answered with code nearly identical to what I had made.  Nice job, Ramesh

{EDIT} Never mind... I'm stupid   I don't need to do the calc...

CS,

This is important... please post the code for the GetRatio function ASAP......

I'll say... we need beer for these types of meetings.  Good to "see" you again ...

Our pleasure... thanks for the feedback...

Sreejith... nice job... you hit the nail on the head... I just played "cleaning lady" on this one.

Great.. thanks for the info.  Glad it helped on performance, too.  I'll give it a whirl tonight...

Result set from another store proc?  I must have missed that one in...

Ramesh,

Can do... but what are the other 4 parameters.  If I add table name to the list of parameters, that will bring the current count of parameters up to 3......

I've made it work a couple of ways but I haven't been able to make it faster than the dynamic SQL solution.  I'm going to leave this one be and...

Yep... I believe you are correctm Gopi... didn't realize the Stor_ID in the Stores table of PUBS was actually a CHAR(4).

Soooooo..... the correct code should look something more like this...

Funny, I don't see a post here by Ramesh... So, what did you guys come up with?

Leifa and David hit the nail on the head... well done.

Unless you want the log to remember that you deleted 200 million rows, DELETE is NOT the way to go...

TRUNCATE is absolutely the fastest way to empty a table, without...

Sounds a little whacked but with 250 columns, might not be as whacked as you think... copy the columns in the SELECT list...