So what are you gonna do Friday night at midnight ?

Don't be sorry... we were all there at some point in our career.

The convert in the select is very minor because it won't affect the query plan (data access wise).  It'll take a few cpu cycles to do the converts, but I...

Hey Joe, don't you feel like you are talking for nothing sometimes???

Guys, Joe literally wrote the book on SQL, he wrote the ISO standards for SQL.  I would strongly suggest...

Let the application worry about that... unless you have loads of different reports using that query.  You could centralize the code.  The convert in the select part only shouldn't slow...

The sliding window was used to do something slightly different but it can be modified for this case.  This is untested and from the top of my head :

create...

Didn't I say that I didn't check the query?!?  I was assuming it was giving the correct results but that he needed only one row.

Also I may suggest that you...

And the max value in all of this??

Agreed... but we don't know the froms and tos of the update so we would just be speculating at this point.

Also the sliding window method doesn't have that limitation

Unoptimized :

SELECT TOP 1 COUNT(EmployeeID), dbo.GetDatePortion(StartTime)

FROM dbo.TimeClock

WHERE StartTime > '2006-10-01' AND startTime < '2006-11-01'

GROUP BY dbo.GetDatePortion(StartTime)

ORDER BY COUNT(EmployeeID) DESC

Not if you index the column.  You can also use the slidding window trick (just search these forums to find it).

Also the idea behind this technic is that you don't...

Sql server enterprise manager, yourserver / gestion / Sql server agent / jobs

Create a new job.  From there just check around and you'll see how to make everything work.

If you...

Good idea but I don't think that there are any moderators on tis site... other than the owners who mainly maintain the site and post editorials.

You might also consider adding a waifor in the loop to let other transactions execute on the table.

Depending on the update you need to do and the power of the...

Happy to have almost helped .