Answer is "There is no point".

If you use identity column you don't really care which line is assigned to which number.

Identity is just a "shortcut" for natural key for data in table. And those...

Data in text column is not actually data. You need to make data from it before you can use it.

Use this procedure to recover your data from the text field...

Jeffrey, because you have 3 "Full Table" joins in your query you've got 267,000 * 3 = 800k lines in Hash Join. Plus some other minor duplicates you must have...

Functions applied to a column in WHERE cause cause fulll table scan. Such queries are slow by design.

You need to dismantle PTY_Party_Code to the parts you need and have them...

Gregory, just for exersise, copy data from all your revenue tables into one (using "UNION" query), set up clustered index on RevenueRecordDate column and run select from this table

Couple of years ago one guy asked the author of the same king of question about he name of conpany he's working for. To aviod using products of that company...

Idea is absolutely right and proven by practice.

But there is one important note for newbies:

You UPDATE ALIAS and always only alias, don't repeat the table name twice.

Do exactly as...

It's really smart to replace 16-bytes uniqueidentifier value with 39 bytes varchar(36) value bringing all those problems with debugging complex queries, potential collation issues, etc.

This topic is another proof that all complexities with queries raise mostly from wrong database design.

XML is for WEB-services. So, it must be parsed and processed there, not in database server.

If you've got '&' in your table then XML file was not processed properly. Fix the...

SELECT DISTINCT  AT.id, AT.taskProblem, AT.dateCreated,

 U.firstname + ' ' + U.lastname AS CreatorName

FROM dbo.cs_ArticleTracking AT

 LEFT JOIN cs_users U ON U.id = AT.Creator

 INNER JOIN dbo.cs_ArticleCategories AC ON AC.parent = AT.parentcategory

     AND...

What is @mdxqry ?

Can you print it?

You need to normalise your table.

Delete your set by parts. Use a bloody loop or a cursor.

It gonna take forever, but at least your table will be accessible all this time.