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...

If the file you are trying to bring in is a text file (fixed field, CSV, Double-Quoted CSV, etc), you can use BCP or, perhaps, Bulk Insert which both operate...

If you aren't making any modifications, seems like the old DOS COPY command would work better and faster.

What is it that you are...

Angela,

Lookup "Expanding Hierarchies" in "Books Online"... has full explanation and an easily modifiable example script that could be changed to a stored procedure.  That's one way to do this.

Another way...

Here's a couple of other ways...

SELECT

   LEFT(SalesName,25) As Name

FROM

   CommERV

WHERE

   ProcessDate = '1/1/05'

   AND RevDate = '1/1/05'

   AND TIN = '2042416'

SELECT

   CAST(SalesName AS VARCHAR(25)) As Name

FROM

   CommERV

WHERE

   ProcessDate...

If you have a clustered index or a primary key on the table (and you absolutely should have a Primary Key on every table), the data will be displayed in...

Andrew,

You'll need to limit the outputs of the UDF's to make it fit your needs, but here's the whole ball of wax... explanation is in the comments.  Includes the test...