Here's a couple of other differences...

PRINT doesn't print those pesky column headers.

PRINT outputs to the MESSAGES tab even if the GRID mode is turned on.  SELECT will print to the...

Ok, so you've shown what doesn't work... what, in your estimation, would work if you were given that particular problem (the Adam Mechanic one) with that particular data?

Michelle/Dolphin,

Thanks for the feedback on the medical community... I guess that's one place where the following saying (author unknown) applies...

"Normalize 'till it hurts,

DeNormalize 'till it works."

>The proprietary syntax has unpredictable results.

Only in something other than the SQL it was written in.  It is not upredictable in SQL Server. 

>Notice that we did not use the...

>First option makes optimizer work faster

Sergiy,

Can you show me where this is written?  The reason I ask is because I've got a bunch of folks at work that use...

Dang... I missed that.  Sorry Shahed and thanks for the feedback.  Glad you got it working...

Roger that... thanks.  I'm just the opposite... I leave the aliases just for brevity... I figure that it takes about 2 seconds to figure out that "c" means "Customer".  But...

Obviously, I haven't tested this but it should be real close.

 UPDATE A

    SET Flag = 1

   FROM A,

        (--Derived table "bd" finds everything in B having a count...

Hi Michael,

Doesn't having the full table name on columns make the code a bit difficult to read for troubleshooting?  I guess it would be ok if the table names were...

Just about anything that can get to the xp_CmdShell and, that would be a lot of things... that's why a lot of DBA's disable it.  I don't know how to...

If you truly need to use positive logic (IS NULL instead of IS NOT NULL) and you also want to check for a zero value, the NULLIF function does a...

For goodness sake, add a Primary Key to the table.  Not for sorting but will nearly double the speed at which queries on large wide tables run because SQL doesn't...

I agree with Ray's basic idea but, just a thought... table names, especially when they are large, can make code pretty well unreadable.  I usually use 1, 2, or 3...

Very, very nice.  I do a lot with Hierarchies and this will really help when 2005 comes out.  Your examples and text based diagrams are awsome.  Thank you very much...

>I cannot get Jeff's solution to work without using GETDATE(). 

What I wrote was meant to solve the original posting which stated... "I would like to be able to...