http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;305977&Product=sql2k

You may never use a table variable outside a function ever again if you study Q3, Q4, and Q5 a bit...

Dang... didn't read down far enough...

DogBot... here's how to create a Tally table without using a cursor or loop...

/****************************************************************************************

 THIS IS A TABLE CREATION SCRIPT

 Purpose:

 This script creates...

DogBot,

Thanks for the feedback and sorry for my absence... been doing the OT thing alot, lately.

When I run...

EXEC FindMatchesN @a='a',@b='b',@c='c'

...against the data in my posting (which I was...

Really, really bad idea to have the table in the format you do... highly denormalized and for more reasons than I can count, you will have more problems with it...

Ok... what's "RDL"?

Ok Tim... hang on... gott wipe some egg off my face

I gotta admit, for self join updates, the Update <alias> is the way...

Have you got any test data setup that you might want to share or do I have to do this the hard way?

Ryan is like that... writing good stuff, I mean.

Thanks for the feedback, Janno.

Well done... but, all that being said, the following works and there is no ambiguity that is not resolved by the optimizer... (maybe I just misunderstood what Seqiy posted and...

>>You UPDATE ALIAS and always only alias, don't repeat the table name twice.

What's the reason for that?  Never had a problem with naming the table twice... and makes lengthy...

Tim has the right idea but I take it one step further.... I always write the SELECT first.  When I'm happy with what I'm seeing, THEN I convert it to...

Absolutely concur... vehemently... heck, a third of the questions on these forums are because of bad database design.

This is just an opinion... hard for me to write this one without sounding a bit Draconian... sorry...

Since views use the indexes from underlying tables, I've never understood the need...

Why not go for the simple method... schedule it with Windows Task Scheduler if you can't get it to run through the command shell.

Since you don't use XACT_Abort and you don't have any error checking code to do a conditional rollback, you don't really need the transaction.