That's a lot to process without some sample data. You're doing procedural programming in SQL which is optimized for declarative programming. You seem to have more code than what you...

I'm not sure about that. Forum posts get tend to decrease significantly...

aaron.reese (11/27/2014)

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All of the suggestions so far with converts and udfs are fine, but I would approach it by building a conversion table

CREATE TABLE dbo.DateConvert(

DB2Date AS VARCHAR(10),

CalendarDate AS DATE

)

INSERT INTO...

There are some problems with this method. For example, the order is not guaranteed and you...

Koen Verbeeck (11/27/2014)

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kaspencer (11/27/2014)

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When you have an Americo-centric question like this, you should provide an alternative, such as one based on St. Georges Day or similar. (OK, so then you'd...

Coalesce returns the first non-null value from a series of values in the same row. These values need to be included as parameters delimited by commas. eg. COALESCE(value1, value2, value3,...

Jeff Moden (11/25/2014)

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Thanks Koen and Eirikur!

How about it folks? There a 1.7 million of you out there. Can we get a few more votes on this important subject?...

Those articles refer mainly to production dbs which need to be in excellent shape. I'm not recommending it but you might use it to generate light copies for development/testing environments....

Jeff Moden (11/26/2014)

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BWAAAA-HAAAAA-HAAAA!!!! I thought...

I really don't like this question because it could create wrong assumptions.

As Hugo said, option 1 could be faster if there are large possibilities of a fifth row existing....

I didn't read this part. Using this as a primary key won't give you any benefits....

I would keep an identity with seed and increment of 5. Based on that identity column, you could calculate the needed sequence. Note that with this formula, you can only...

I would still use an arithmetic formula instead of string manipulation.

CREATE FUNCTION ConvertLegacyIntToDate

(

@LegacyDate int

)

RETURNS TABLE WITH SCHEMABINDING AS

RETURN

SELECT CAST( CAST( 19000000 + oldDate AS CHAR(8)) AS date) as NewDate

Or I...

Date columns should use one of the available date data types (date, datetime, datetime2, etc). Those data types don't care about format. Different formats for input and display can be...

Here's one possible solution. It creates a way to make a self join with the previous reportrundate for each invoiceno and invoicepart. Feel free to ask any questions that you...