I'd argue against the marketing comment for the most part. There are people that fit that category. Without a doubt.

But most of the MVPs I know, and I think I...

I'd say it's appreciating what you have, striving to get more, but understanding that things are things, and not nearly as important as other things in your life.

Now, now, Jeff. We typically spread manure, not haul it. I think it's more like using a handheld grass spreader to distribute manure 😉

They'll certainly give us lots of questions to answer!

checkpoints are roughly every few minutes. Not sure how this impacts what you're trying to do.

You need to set it to get a subquery to get the aggregate.

So

create table MyTable

( myID int

,salesdate datetime

, myval int

)

go

create table NewTable

( myID int

...

One time thing or a process?

One time, use QA. run the query, right click the upper left, save as.

Process, use DTS. The data export wizard will help you build the...

And run Profiler to see if things are moving while it's executing.

It's a syntax error, you need to see the query to figure out what's wrong.

It's going to be one or the other all the time.

They're planing SQL 11, or about to, so I'd encourage Jeff to hit the MVP groups and post suggestions for...

Space might be available for new rows, but they aren't necessarily reused. Your clustered index might cause things to be more spread out, and depending on the values, pages might...

Terry has it correct. The backup process is optimized to throw pages out as quickly as possible and it has no tolerance for IO delays. So if the network hiccups...

I think you'd

select @a = myval, @b-2 = myval2, etc.

from myCTE

How current do the reports need to be? Database mirroring and snapshots (if you have enterprise) can help here. Or replication to a second server.

This kind of sounds like a test question, so I'll ask you to show some work.

As a hint, a subquery and a max() aggregate can help.