I'm with Vladan on this one.  This topic has spawned a few 100 articles on the web because the topic is so large.  Here are 2 articles that will get...

IIRC I had tested them in both orders.  Do you have different results to show us?

You can always set a goal to build something challenging, then write an article about it!

Off course the money is not as great .

HTH .

Yup : DDL = data definition language.

Sounds like we may use this code for the same purpuse .

USE SSC

GO

CREATE TABLE #Results (txtResult varchar(2000) NULL)

INSERT INTO #Results (txtResult)

EXEC master.dbo.xp_cmdshell 'DIR D:\*_BACKUP_*.*'

SELECT...

I'm not sure I'm following and I don't want to guess at this one.

Can you post the tables ddl for the 2 tables concerned, some sample data from both tables...

I recall the best way to solve this one as I've never worked with server generated identities (other than identity column).

I'll see what other dbas have to offer.

PS May I...

This is the main problem

Where exists(Select * From apvend   Where fvtype = 'MD')

It will always return true or always return false because fvtype = 'MD' will also be true...

I would assume that more than one row are being inserted... causing the error. Can you verify that?

The case statement should look like this :

CASE WHEN Col001 NOT LIKE 'NULL' THEN[Col001] ELSE NULL END,

But it can be shortened up with this :

NULLIF(Col001, 'NULL') to get the...

This is one of the dirtiest trick in the book, but it looks like it was made for this problem :

PS This solution cannot safely be implemented on the...

The only solution I can give is to make sure that the query returns as little rows as humanly possible.  Try converting the left joins to inner join where possible.

Can...

Too many disks IO on the server

Too many indexes to reorder

Not enough memory

Temdb too small or on a slow disk (or the same disk as the insert and transaction log).

That's...

I'm working as a freelancer as well.  So I would assume I would be at the low end of the scale on that point (only 45 can $/ hour).  But...