Ilan,

You can use Case on the right side of the "=" sign in SET statments... something like this (could understand exactly what you were trying to do in your example...

Have you tried using the "Index Tuning Wizard" in Query Ananlyzer?  It does do some remarkable things if you let it.  And you would be surprised how much a single...

Ilan,

Open "Books on Line" (comes free with SQL Server) and look up the BCP Utility.  It has examples...

It may help you to know that BCP.EXE runs from the "DOS" or...

Lot's of good ideas by lots of good folks... still, I think the clustered index is eating your insert time alive.  Try removing all clustered indexes and adding non-clustered indexes...

One more thing... again, I don't remember the exact number but if you end up with over something like 254 columns in a table, IT CANNOT BE REPLICATED if replication...

Unless you have TEXT or BINARY fields, you're also limited to (if I remember correctly) only 8096 bytes per row no matter how many VARCHAR(8000) fields you have.  So, my...

Henk,

The problem with CLUSTERED indexes is that they live in the data and should just not be used for transactional tables.  Inserting into the "middle" of a 4 million record...

I'll probably get a huge number of arguments from this but you're really opening yourself up to a world of hurt if you move into the TEXT datatype.  They're difficult...

Colin,

First, if you are not using the Enterprise Edition, adding memory over 2 Gig is fruitless because the Standard Edition is limited.

If this is something like a daily, weekly or...

Oh crud... I just checked some of the switches for the scptsfr.exe routine I told you about and I don't think it'll work because the login is always "SA".  If...

There's a nasty VB program at C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\80\Tools\DevTools\Samples\sqldmo\vb\SQLScripts on the server.  If you can't get to that, there's an .EXE called "scptxfr.exe"...

Stefan,

This is similar to the procedure that I use although my inputs are a little different (easy for you to modify, if you want).  Instead of inputing a row number,...

Carl, these are similar to some of the others but thought I'd post it anyway

------ Finds the LAST day of NEXT month (Time=23:59:59.997) (resolution is 3 ms)

SELECT DATEADD(ms,-3,DATEADD(mm,DATEDIFF(mm,0,@Date)+2,0))

   ...

Just curious... are any of the joined "tables" really views?  That's what happened to me at work... just did a SELECT * to see what I got back from a...

NVarchar uses two bytes per character.  There is no reason to use it unless there is something "language specific" or the system requires it.