Let me flog the almost dead horse a bit more Hans. The cost limit can be set for each for individual connections and/or for the entire server. ...

Would this be too simple an approach? I think it gets what you are after via Rowcount and could be gotten right after your initial query was done. ...

Hi. I too had seen the SET QUERY_GOVERNOR_COST_LIMIT value out there in BOL . My question would be how could you be sure that all ad-hoc queries...

Jay, I think this is what you were afer. Whether the Identity property is set for a column is stored in the staus column of syscolumns (encoded in...

Hmm.. how do you guess this code is the problem? Could you try either Activity Monitor (in Enterprise Mgr under Management..Current Activity) or System Monitor (from...

I agree you do not really need the temporary table unless you want it to be able to review results before making final changes to the "live" database.

If you...

Oh... one more thing. If there are Null values in any of your comparison columns, then you would have to treat those separately (doing comparisons with Null is...

If there is another field in the table that would determine which of the duplicate records you want to keep (such as the oldest record) you could key off that...

Would this help?

declare @var varchar(10), @int dec(4,3)

set @int=4.678

set @var = substring(cast(@int as varchar(5)),1, 4)

select 'Number is '+ cast(@int as varchar(5)) + ' Character is ' + @var

Toni

Can you post the DDL for the tables including keys/refererence? Your joins may be producing duplicate results.

Toni

Wouldn't it be a RIGHT join vs a Left join to get nulls from the table you are joining?

Toni

You could partition the tables so that Query Optimizer can pick which table to go against depending on the value of the year. For each year, create a...

Have you checked the access /security authorizations on the other table/server?

Toni

At this point it won't work because table_small.smallid is an integer (identity) being compared to a description.

Toni

Ian, thanks for taking the time to put the test data together that really is a key to getting the full idea and answer for the question. I initially...