That what I'm dealing with. Bloody 3rd part application.

And what causes my deepest frustration.

It's funny, but in order to work with it people load the whole database across servers line-by-line....

Eric, actually Invoices and Orders must be IN THE SAME TABLE, not to mention database.

Separating it is breaking of relational model, just a little bit.

Placing it into different databases -...

Don't ever use anything like this.

They name it "hidden cursor", and performance of such queries is terrible.

Why don't you just inbuild query to your DB into the spreadsheet?

Check out in Excel: Data -> Get External Data -> New Database Query.

What if some computers have more than 2 disks?

Note the difference between sequrity environment for your account (running Windows Explorer), account started SQL Server (running Osql) and account started SQL Agent (running Osql if you call it from...

Just make sure indexing is OK.

Clustered index on (PupilID, StartDate) + index on StartDate will make this query terribly fast.

SUM(DATEDIFF(n, Start, End))

If you need to reference data in 2 tables by FK that means those tables are parts of the same database.

Separation of them was (is) a mistake and must be...

DECLARE @rc int

SET @rc = 1

SET ROWCOUNT 500

WHILE @rc > 0

BEGIN

DELETE FROM [dbo].[orders]

WHERE <your criteria>

SET @rc = @@ROWCOUNT

WAITFOR DELAY '00:00:02.000' -- to let...

OK, MCDBA suppose to know the difference between UNION and UNION ALL.

UNION inclused implicit DISTINCT keyword.

So, your queries are just not equal.

System functions are local to the scope. You need to "get into that database shoes"

USE DBA

GO

CREATE PROC dbo.GetStat @ObjectID int, @IndId smallint

AS

select stats_date(@ObjectID, @IndId )

That's probably because of what you are trying to do within that START.

There must be some OSQL or BCP call, right?

Much shorter option:

REPLACE(STR(@n*100, 13), ' ', '0')

Give it a try.

It works with CREATE/DROP objects, it's OK for temporary objects, but it will fail on compilation time if there is a SELECT from not existing static object.

To...