But if capacity is more important for you than precision to the last digit then you probably will go with FLOAT result.

For N = 115 it returns 2.9250936934930141E+188 and still...

There is a solution without loops - single "select" (according to what "SQL" stands for).

It involves very famous table Tally (regards to you know who ;))

[Code]

DECLARE @I BIGINT

select @I...

David McFarland (11/6/2007)

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Sergiy (11/5/2007)

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David, what did you prove?[/QUOTE]

That you were wrong. No big deal, as I've done it before, and I'll do it again (based on your "maths" skills, probably...

After TAble B is populated:

CREATE VIEW dbo.mytable AS SELECT * FROM dbo.tableB

Then do data update in tableA

After it's finished:

DROP VIEW dbo.mytable

CREATE VIEW dbo.mytable AS SELECT * FROM dbo.tableA

How did you know?

😀

wackoyacky (11/5/2007)

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Hi Serg,

But wouldn't it be an additional hit on the transactional tables, especially if the traffic on that table is very high? But I will consider it as...

Let's assume that:

TheTable is your table you update;

StTable is Staging Table you just inserted;

KeyCol - one or more columns uniquely identifying rows in TheTable.

[Code]

DELETE FROM TheTable

WHERE NOT EXISTS (select 1...

John N (11/5/2007)the data is not really that much but the problem is it's coming from a vendor api with a standard data for all their users. Unfortunately they don't...

David McFarland (11/5/2007)

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I said no such thing. I said they're not a representation of...

David, what did you prove?

My statement was exactly this:

Probably 2k5 is more comfortable for procedural language programmers, but for those who understand relational model and use to operate with datasets...

Why tables?

Views...

John, how much of you data is actually changed during those updates?

From my experience it's typically 5-10% of the total amount of data.

Then you need to upload into some staging...

Matt, there is no any risk.

Just do it proper way.

To make sure the way is really proper copy proven solution.

Open this table in "design table" window in EM.

Change datatype for...

I did not invent it.

😉

It's proven working by years of thousands developers experience working with EM:

this approach...

Good story about "copy-drop-rename" approach is that it does not require any stoppage during copy process.

After it's finished you may revisit the data and find what's changed since you've started...