Normally when an example is given using values A, B and C they should be taken as algebraic variables who's contents can change. More like this example:

DECLARE @A char(1), @b-2...

Alexander-449406 (6/6/2014)

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I have generated test data with 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 rows and according to my tests all the queries proposed run within 1 second. You...

This script may be ok to use on some occasions but if the entry of the parameters is from an external input, e.g. a web page, then it could be...

Or this:

;WITH CTE AS

(

SELECT E.Company,

E.Employee,

...

I think simply testing for existence should do what you need.

SELECT E.Company,

E.Employee,

E.TermDate

FROM...

Good article. Nice way of selecting all columns when detecting duplicates for a subset of the columns.

So this is your homework?

Is there a maximum number of distinct serial numbers or are there at most 7 like in your example?

I think this might be what you need:

;WITH CTE AS

(

SELECT DISTINCT

SerialBox

...

I just tried it on a bit of xml that had a DataLength of 13859 and it took 3:28 (3 minutes 28 seconds) to complete. I then tried it on...

I tried running it on a bit of xml that stores an order on our database.

It ran for over 6 minutes before I stopped it.

Using a cursor:

DECLARE myCursor cursor LOCAL FORWARD_ONLY FAST_FORWARD READ_ONLY

FOR SELECT OfficeId

FROM dbo.Office

DECLARE @OfficeId int,...

Or using CROSS APPLY:

SELECT OfficeID,

S.StateAbbr,

C.countrynames

FROM dbo.Office O

CROSS APPLY (SELECT TOP(1)

...

A csv list can also be generated using "FOR XML"

I rewrote the final query using this method:

SELECT OfficeID, 
       (SELECT TOP(1)
...

Hi James,

I'm not sure exactly what you are trying to do. Is it that you have a stored procedure that calls an inline table function and it's the inline table...