Milovan,

I noticed that all of the other solutions, although well written and functional, contain WHILE loops.  Inherently, WHILE loops are slower than setbased code especially if you have a lot...

To do this, you will need a BCP format file OR, lose the IDENTITY column.  BCP Format files can actually do all of the parsing in the final format for...

It's easy with a Tally (or Numbers) table...

--===== This is just part of the test setup...

--===== If experimental tables exists, drop them

     IF OBJECT_ID('TempDB..#yourtable') IS NOT NULL

        DROP...

Is is "death by SQL" to change the Server Wide Setting but if you insist on a certain proc being able to evaluate IF NULL=NULL, then you can use SET...

Outstanding Gail... I forgot about the batchsize thing... to take that a bit further, I used BCP for a similar requirement with 40 million rows... Using a batch size of...

The SELECT/INTO works very fast because the new destination table has no indexes to update and no check constraints. 

If you add the WITH (NOLOCK) hint to the FROM clause,...

You say 'em, I'll make 'em. What a team!  The neat thing here is that using NEWID as the seed for RAND allows true...

Here's a set-based method...

 SELECT CHAR(RAND(CAST (NEWID() AS VARBINARY))*26+65)

      + CHAR(RAND(CAST (NEWID() AS VARBINARY))*26+65)

      + CHAR(RAND(CAST (NEWID() AS VARBINARY))*26+65)

      + CHAR(RAND(CAST (NEWID() AS VARBINARY))*26+65)

      + CHAR(RAND(CAST (NEWID() AS VARBINARY))*26+65)

      + CHAR(RAND(CAST (NEWID()...

Yeaup!  That's the one!!  You were there, too, Jesper... way too much fun!

Here's one that absolutely rocks!  I don't remember the person who wrote it originally, but the two of us played with it and it generates a list on a million...

We call it the "Easy button"...

Thanks Carlos!  Comments like yours make it all worth while!

There's a couple hundred different ways of doing this... here's one...

--For NANPA numbers only...

 CREATE TABLE #example (ID INT IDENTITY(1,1), PhoneNum VARCHAR(15))

 INSERT INTO #example (PhoneNum)

 SELECT '2223334444' UNION...

Nicely done...

Maybe, but the use of the "double parameter" isn't really going to slow anything down here...  I am confused by your posting, though... you say "giving me the first Monday"......