I was thinking the same thing 😀

Your answer is an indication of the "Lack of knowledge" in these issues.

When you need to fail over to the replicated site you need to have there the...

Believe me, Plenty. and with a very high transaction rate.

Now, how many have you replicated using IDENTITY columns ?

In 2005 your statement works without the View trick

CREATE VIEW TOP2PERORDER

AS

SELECT c.CustomerID, c.CompanyName, o.OrderDate, 2 data

FROM Orders o INNER JOIN Customers c ON o.CustomerId = c.CustomerId

WHERE o.OrderId IN

(SELECT TOP 2 o2.OrderID FROM

...

I am pretty sure your column value has PADDING Spaces.

Try selecting DATALENGTH on your column

yes Numerator = 1 and Denominator = 3 🙂

create an strored procedure on the remote server with your query in it

Execute the remote procedure.

Well I have to *Differ* with Jeff statements that IDENTITY is "always" the solution for these cases. If you have to deal with replication you will learn to "hate" identity...

>>What would be the best way to lock the table MyControlTable so that other processes may not select or update it when this script is running.<<<

Use an UPDATE statement (with...

All that behaviour depends on the "app" launched by xp_cmdshell. If when you kill the "app" xp_cmdshell receives an exception you don't have to kill the "parent" spid. If it...

TOP clause without ORDER BY does not returns deterministic values.

select DATALENGTH ( column )

from [yourtable]

where pkey = xyz

Another effect that HT can bring is that there is a new error reported by schedulers which differ in 3ms variations and that can affect time computations performed by SQL...

???

select Account_nbr, NRV_CODE, SUM(charges) as Total_NRV

from [sourcetable]

group by Account_nbr, NRV_CODE

???

Or maybe what you want is simply :

select NRV_CODE, SUM(charges) as Total_NRV

from [sourcetable]

group by NRV_CODE