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.

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Nice...

Concur and now I get it... you were warning everyone of the same thing I was thinking... the requirement was for 4 digits left-padded with zeros and I'm thinking that's...

I don't think he intends to store that in his database, Joe.  3rd party vendors frequently as for data in such a form.  And, no, there's not always a front...

Requirement is to show missing months as well

Dang... missed that one, David... nice catch.

Yep... you shouldn't put 3 pounds of meat in a 2 pound wrapper, for sure.

Thanks for the feedback, Dennis.  Appreciate it.

I forgot about that bloody chart.  Good find, Mike and thanks for the feedback.