There are no differences. You guys are suggesting the same technique for sorting.

/Kenneth

Here's a few variations on the first/last day of month theme..

-- 2003-03-11 / Kenneth Wilhelmsson

-- This is a sample matrix showing how to find out dates of month...

Though, with pivot in SS 2005 you still need to know the #items beforehand, so that matter still matters.

/Kenneth

What about the WHERE 1 = 1 part...? Seems a bit redundant to me.

/Kenneth

Scale and precision is just something I choose at random, not optimized, but this seems to work..?

select cast(8.5164835164835168E-2 as decimal(20,15))

----------------------

.085164835164835

(1 row(s) affected)

/Kenneth

Not entirely sure, but when reading the change log at http://www.sqldev.net/xp/xpsmtp.htm I get the feeling that @message and @messagefile are mutually exclusive. Haven't done any testing on it, though. If...

bcp only does two things:

1) takes data from table(s) to a flat file

2) takes a file and loads it into a table

It doesn't seem like bcp fits anywhere in your...

Personally I prefer (and so far always does) to just wham the file into a staging table using bcp, and then do whatever cleaning/validation/etc necessary by Transact SQL. For the...

No problems.

It's just that many forget how good BOL is, so I use to redirect there rather than just state the answers. In BOL you can most of the times...

To see the answer to that question, please open up BOL and search for 'sp_dropdevice'

/Kenneth

I don't do much openquery stuff, but it seems like the problem is that the entire remote table (200k) is brought over the wire before the join takes place.

You might...

Are the index statistics up to date?

Databases are living breathing entities. It's not that uncommon that once in a while, behaviour for the 'same' query may change. There are many...

Yes, that's correct. bcp is 'straight forward'

If you want to do transformations on the fly, take a look at DTS instead.

/Kenneth

You cannot use a tablename with a variable like that.

Could you please explain what you are trying to do?

(..and I'm not going to recommend using dynamic SQL without...

Hmmm.. Perhaps you could please explain what your problem really is? I mean, why are you trying the hardest to go around the very thing that databases are all about...