Heh... apparently, the OP has left the building. 😀

IMHO, take the time to force the MAX to be out of row and default the error to an empty string to prevent the pointer from being "expansive".  Have max...

If you're going to do lots of date-related analysis, I'd just create a Calendar table with all the columns you want to group by, and then join to that...

The question now is, do you understand why the fix worked and why you were getting the original issue?

The other question is, do you know...

Bumping this for you because I'd like to see what other people have to say about this for Database Code.

On the subject of the backup failure...

IMHO (and experience but YMMV), it's a complete waste of time to backup a 2TB log file (happened to me the 2nd day of...

Next year, the 1st of January occurs on a Monday.  What do you want to do with the previous Sunday, which is from the previous year?

Sorry... posted to the wrong question and removed this post.  See the next post down for my answer on this posted problem.

"The damned recruiter gave the candidates both the questions and the answers.  I know this because I added a "hairball" question with a totally made up answer and when...

First, nice article.  It appears well written, is in a good "order of revelation", and includes the code in an easy to read format.  Kudos for all that and thank...

Duration only identifies how long something has been running.  It is possible that a SPID was running something with many queries for a long period and, when it finally got...

I wouldn't rebuild indexes that don't need it.  I'm...

Post withdrawn.

I've been through that with a recruiter before.  The recruiter wanted the questions and the answers so that they could do the filtering.

The damned recruiter gave the candidates both the...

With the understanding that this is nothing against you, if we posted such questions and the answers here, that would eventually render them useless in interviews because people will do...