VERY cool... I've seen a lot of hierarchical code in my time... this is great...  First time I've seen anyone make good use of the CONTINUE statement without them getting...

Heh... I sure do appreciate what that's all about... been there and done that... just not with a cursor so I have no idea if a cursor can be created...

Why do you need a cursor for this?  If you converted the cursor to set based code, the dynamic SQL would work just fine...

Not a bad function but it takes more than 4 minutes to execute on a mere million rows where each row contains a six word value...

The following function, butt ugly...

As Ryan pointed out... had a little bug in my code and repaired it.  Managed to condense it a bit, too.  Still takes a very pigish 16 mintues to run...

First, create a translation table... here's the code...

--===== Create the translation table and seed with

     -- 62 numbers from 0 to 61

     -- (10 digits + 26...

Unfortunately, all data needs to be accessed all the time in the quickest time possible. When processing new data, a complete read of previous related totals (back to day...

Like I said above, YAML (http://www.yaml.org) seems like a decent alternative for data transfer, .ini files, etc.

Is is a decent substitution for XML as it's very human readable, but...

Minh,

Do you actually need separate columns or can the data look like this...

Product       ProductChoices

----------------  -------------------------------------------------------------------

671703420  '158779036X  1587790637  SM96 1889241075'

I dunno... I don't think the count method could be made to work with any great effeciency here.  At best, you'd end up with a triangular join...

Dunno, Hector... I hardly ever use DTS so I've never made the comparison.  Seems like you have, though.  I do have a couple of DTS jobs coming up in the future......

Yep...I see what you mean, Ryan... I was introduced to the CHAR/INT-.5 method a couple of days ago and (screwed up is what I did

Also, I wish I can find where to specify the delimeter when saving from Grid. So far i did not find one. It is certainly not in Tools->Options

You can only...

DC... thanks for the great article.  Like many have said, it has sparked a bit of a controversy both pro and con.  It's articles (and the related responses, inflamatory or...

The "real" SQL Server requires that it be installed on a Windows SERVER.  The only edition you can install on a non-Windows Server is the "Developers Edition" (same as Enterprise...