Hey Steve,

I just want to say how much I enjoyed reading your article today (even if I don't necessarily agree with all the content!)

I have the greatest admiration for anyone...

Venting time. Feel free to skip this post if you're not in the mood to hear me whinge on... 🙂

So, this guy Steve McRoberts goes to all the trouble...

Nonsense. SQL Server contains many optimizations for generating...

Two points, one quick, and one not so quick:

1. (The quick one)...

Barry, you're probably in the right area there. I agree that BCP is the fastest of the bulk tools available, at least in my experience. The core BCP...

Hey Carlo...would you please define 'best' for me? 😀

Good response there Jeff - and Matt makes good points too.

I'm glad we are much closer in agreement on the CLR stuff than I suspected.

As far as extending T-SQL is...

8060 bytes is the maximum one row can consume on the top-level data page.

More than 8060 bytes of data can be stored in a row, either by using true LOB...

Ah right. It's really important to distinguish between storage and execution behaviour with MAX data types. The comments I made previously were exclusively...

Jeff Moden (10/17/2009)

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Heh... not to worry. There's nothing like confirmation of code. Between you and Adam, I've learned something today. You should see how many times the...

Jeff,

A more generic XML solution, which doesn't suffer from the entitization problem is:

;WITH Drink (name, id)

AS (

...

Hey Sam,

I have to say it, so I'll get it out of the way up front: doing data access from a function is rarely optimal. My preference would be...

On the face of it, yes. And, most of the time,...

RBarryYoung (10/14/2009)

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I have tried it Simon, and when I implemented it, SB eliminated about half of the code in your article and was considerably simpler. What SB gets rid...

The problem only affects 64-bit Standard Edition.

In 32-bit Standard Edition,...