I understand your point of view... a shortcut like this could be usefull.  But can you give me a single production context where this comes in handy???  I'm sure there...

You got my attention on there!!

Where do you take this list of 1500 ids?

Why not use an inner join?

Congrats on the 4K mile Jeff.

1 : Restore table from backup

2 : Make sure you always have a backup

3 : NEVER EVER WORK ON PRODUCTION SERVER.

4 : Search these forums.  That answer is posteds few times...

Did you check the execution plan of the slow reports' queries?

Maybe there's just a small thing that changed the normal plan. 

When did you update the stats?

When was the last...

Test it both ways.  The advantage of the ­<> method is that the server will do less writes on the HD (which is usually the slowest operation to do on...

Books online, upgrade advisor.

I'd like to see that source too. I don't see any reason for any version to be any faster.  In fact, the numeral version will be depreciated soon.

I will even suggest one step better :

SET @MyVar = ISNULL((SELECT ColName FROM Table WHERE Condtition = Returns1RowOnly), '')

That way if hte select returns more than 1 row, the...

We'll see about that Steve .

Or then again, maybe Steve is above your average Joe DBA .

SELECT @MyVar = ISNULL(ColName, '') FROM dbo...

You can't use a select to return data and set a variable at the same time.  You must do this in 2 steps.

Also you must consider that the select can...

It's not a good idea to put those values directly in the code.  You're better off putting them into a table a selecting from that table.