Your post raises some interesting points.

I can only take the senders word for it.

I wouldn't, but your way leads to an easier life!

Would you be prepared to share the code...

The FORMAT() function performs notoriously poorly. If you are processing a lot of data, I suggest you remove it and find another way (either in code, or using Excel or...

It may be an integer-division issue.

Try multiplying by 100.0 first, to force a decimal calculation:

Successful Picks * 100.0 / Total Picks

Note also that you have misspelled 'successful'.

I assume no one is suggesting that the act of sending this file is adding those characters?

You should be able to prove that the file structure has changed by using...

Also, why not just use

ORDER BY BusinessEntityID, OrderDate

?

It might perform better.

Define 'properly'. It looks OK to me, unless you want to sort on the name of the month, rather than its ordinal.

Having a single, multifunctional behemoth package is generally regarded as bad practice. Better to add five execute package tasks to your master package rather than copy everything in.

If these child...

If you had the following two rows, which value would you select for Col4, and why?

(1,2,3,4), (1,2,3,5)

Add a data conversion component between source and destination to change the datatype of Symbol as required.

Some observations:

1. You have written a load of text without asking for anything.
2. This looks like homework. For example, no one would ever key a table on 'first name' in...

I'd be interested to hear how long the new version takes.

I have not opened that attachment. Rather than 'JOIN' it sounds more like you want to concatenate.

Look up the CONCAT() function. It will help you with this.

If everything about the SELECT is static other than this 'value', you may be able to create a table-valued function (link) for them.

My suggestion is to look again. I just searched for this and found such a script on my first attempt. Remember, XML files are just text files.

Have you looked at the Execution Plans?

• This reply was modified 2 years, 9 months ago by Phil Parkin.
• This reply was modified 2 years, 9 months ago by Phil Parkin.