Hi,

I can use something like SQL Compare which has been around for a while, has been thoroughly tested out by thousands of users, and probably does all (or almost all)...

Be careful in your reasoning: clearly in some cases you can replace a temporary table with a CTE and boost performance. This is what you are describing and quite well....

Also Steve: I think Hugo is absolutely correct.

Cheers,

Alex Kuznetsov,

SQL Server MVP

The best practice is to always prefix column names, which prevents such errors.

Cheers,

Alex Kuznetsov,

SQL Server MVP

I think it's a horrible idea, should be mush slower than a cursor in most cases, and more sophisticated.

I prefer to use C++ approach - I define macros in a *.h file and have them replaced by actual definition by the preprocessor. For instance, I used to have...

Jacob,

Use UNION ALL instead of UNION unless you explicitly need to remove duplicates - this might perform faster.

Be very careful: even with READ COMMITTED isolation level you can get inconsistent results in your reports:

http://www.devx.com/dbzone/Article/32957/0/page/2

SQL Server MVP Peter DeBetta has recently wrote on the same problem:

http://sqlblog.com/blogs/peter_debetta/archive/2007/02/12/multiple-valued-parameters.aspx

I think his conclusions are different.

WHILE and loop might work much slower than a cursor. Look up

sqlserver-tips.blogspot.com/2006/09/when-eliminataing-cursors-hurts.html