1. Create FOR DELETE trigger on your table to...

Then you need to exactly what they ask.

1st, figure out highest rate for each book:

(Select MAX(Rating) as TopRating, BookId

from dbo.BooksRatings

group by BookId ) A

2nd, you need to retrieve all records...

I'd suggest ot have it in a separate...

CONVERT(VARCHAR(8), DATEADD(ss, 12345, 0) ,114) will cut off milliseconds.

If use such scenarios why pay so big money for SQL Server licenses?

Flat files will work as good.

26 seconds for work out 2 mil rows???

There must be no indexes, no keys...

Actually NOT EXISTS typically performs not worse than LEFT JOIN and in some cases it beats LEFT JOIN quite significantly.

That's why I use NOT EXISTS as a standard.

DATEADD(dd, DATEDIFF(dd, 0, GETDATE() ), 0)

It remains datetime, but without time portion.

"as Combined_Notes" to be removed

It depends on your definition of result set.

declare @cn as varchar(2000)

select @cn = notes + char(13) + char(10) + resolution as Combined_Notes

...

Delete from My_Sales_Table

Is it some kind of staging table?

Then consider to use temp table or - even better - table variable.

It will eliminate distributed transaction.

As for static table - consider...

Hi Sergei,

1st, you probably posted on wrong forum: sys.tables works for SQL2005, not SQL2000.

2nd, constraints happen to be not only primary.

LEFT JOIN TBL_ANCHOR_EVENT

SELECT 0 AS ID, -1 AS PARENT_ID, ROOT AS NAME

UNION ALL

SELECT ID, ISNULL(PARENT_ID, 0), NAME

FROM TableName

It's good you have no power to alter the existing table.

Its structure is better...