LOL!!!! Well, no wonder I've been having such a rough go of it. Guess I gotta learn to program better, since I can't make the Aspergers go away... might...

that would be too easy... it's LEN()

You can shrink the database, but you'll need to rebuild all the indexes, because shrinking the DB makes a mess of the indexing.

I can't claim to be an expert on the subject, but here's a good article by Itzik Ben-Gan that shows different ways to do it and the performance of each...

Sorry, gotta read more slowly.

What does the WHERE clause of your stored procedure look like? Do you have defaults set for the two parameters?

Something like this maybe?

declare @tbl table(dt datetime, completeName varchar(100))

INSERT INTO @tbl values('20151130', 'Me'), ('20151110', 'other people'), ('20151201', 'candidat 1'), ('20151201', 'candidat 2')

SELECT * FROM @tbl order by dt ;

SELECT t1.dt,

stuff(...

Oh, that's much easier. If all you want is to show the parameter value in the header in upper case, put a textbox in the header, and set the...

You're using SQL 2005, right? (Just to be sure I'm not creating a solution that won't work on 2005!)

Here's a query that would identify just the first id....

WITH MyDupesRN AS...

Not enough information given to answer the question. If this is a child table to another table, then there may be a good reason for duplicate values. ...

Are you trying to force the parameter value being supplied by the user to be converted to upper case as they type?

If you just want to show the parameter on your report, but in uppercase, I would do it in SSRS.

Something like

=UCase(Parameters!ParamName.Value)

where ParamName is the name of your parameter.

For grins, this...

You can't with a Calendar control... You'd have to use a dropdown and use a query against a Calendar table.

create table scripts? insert scripts? expected results?

I'm holding up some fingers. Guess how many.

a view would probably be simplest. But test it for yourself. Clear the buffers on your dev server (not the production server!!!), set statistics IO on, set statistics...

If all the parameters have defaults, then there's nothing for the report to wait for... you could add a fake parameter and SSRS would be forced to wait for the...