Yes - do you want to warn them first or just torpedo them?

Is the remote server running in 'mixed' mode, or using Windows authentication only?

(Right click the server in Enterprise Manager, properties, Security, Authentication.)

Regards

Apart from msdb, model, master and tempdb, what 'System' databases do you have in mind?

Regards

And I just joined the throng

This code does it in one pass.

declare @InsertParentID int

set @InsertParentID = 2  --or whatever value you need to insert

insert into table1(parentID, itemID)

select @InsertParentID, (select max(t1.itemID) + 1 from table1 t1...

You can also try

select * from child c

left join parent p on c.childID = p.parentID

where p.parentID is null

and see which is faster.

It was fixed in time for me to get it right

How about coming at this from another angle.  Could you write some script, or maybe an executable would be better, that creates a single spreadsheet containing the ~1000 records and...

Your syntax isn't quite right.  Try this:

insert into sales_copy(stor_id,ord_num,ord_date,qty,payterms,title_id)

select stor_id, ord_num, ord_date, qty, payterms, title_id from sales

Does the insertion order matter?  Can't you just create a clustered primary key to force the display order?

Apart from the table names being plural (I think most DB developers tend to stick to singular), your naming convention looks absolutely fine to me.  Having a 'LastUpdated' column in...

Rather than DROP/CREATE, why don't you just TRUNCATE the table?  Not that that will save much time though ...

Deterministic or not, the argument (and therefore the result) of the CONVERT function varies every time the function is called.  If 250,000 rows are returned, that's approx 40 million invocations...

Oh good.  Well, if there's a lot of data, that's a lot of CONVERTs - approx 15 per row returned.  I reckon it might all add up.  Missing links don't...

Do you mean why is it faster doing nothing than doing CONVERTs??