Breaking a big transaction in smaller batches is not nesting transactions. The main benefit is less transaction log space used (the log can be truncated by checkpoints in simple recovery...

Weird, I never came across such a situation.

Sorry for being unhelpful.

What does job activity monitor say? Does it display the job as executing or completed?

Duplicate post. Replies here please: http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/FindPost1699207.aspx

Job history does not show information for running executions of the job. It only show information for the latest completed execution.

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Congrats Alan! My second daughter turns 3 months on Friday and I can confirm that SQL stands for Sleep Quality Lowered in this case 😀

Can you resolve the server name?

nslookup servername

Can you ping the server name?

ping servername

Can you connect to the server on port 1433? (Download portqry from here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=17148)

portqry -n servername -p TCP...

This procedure has been migrated from Oracle. Returning a cursor from a stored procedure is a common pattern in Oracle, but much less common in SQL Server.

This is because Oracle...

If you installed SQL Server Express using the default settings, it installed a named instance (SQLEXPRESS). This instance is listening on a dynamic port by default. The only way to...

Thanks for the feedback!

Brilliant! Works like a treat!

The error suggests that the server name was misspelled in the ODBC settings. Did you check it?

Maybe this?

DECLARE @tmp TABLE(fruit VARCHAR(50),shop VARCHAR(10),preference INT, qty INT)

INSERT INTO @tmp(fruit,shop,preference,qty) VALUES ('orange','shop 1',1 ,4)

INSERT INTO @tmp(fruit,shop,preference,qty) VALUES ('orange','shop 2',2 ,3)

INSERT INTO @tmp(fruit,shop,preference,qty) VALUES ('orange','shop 3',3 ,5)

INSERT INTO @tmp(fruit,shop,preference,qty) VALUES...

I tried to play with the code a bit, but frankly I have no time. Probably your initial idea of using a temp table and compute the sums is the...