Thanks SQLRNNR.

That was definitely my first thought, but it doesn't really enforce the "two members per team" rule; whereas the other way around enforces it quite explicitly.

Maybe I should...

Yea, I've come to that conclusion. I was trying to use that stat for a simple shortcut in this case. Should have known better!

Thanks all!

Makes good sense. I'll have to study the plan. I would think the window and the self join end up with the same plan. Probably a good lesson to be...

Thanks for the alternative. Hmm, sure is cleaner syntax wise. Interesting thing about it is that if I understand the execution plan correctly, it takes twice as long. Rather shocking!...

Got it. Thank you both.

I wanted to practice this scenario a time or two so I setup some tsql to cause a deadlock, and sure enough, it will cause a deadlock every time. I'm...

Wow, thank you Gail. Chapter 42 is the clearest, most straight forward explanation I've ever seen regarding deadlocks. I would highly recommend it to anyone looking to deal with deadlocks....

Thanks all for the great info. Sounds like I need to educate myself on deadlock graphs. I just happen to have the SQL Server MVP Deep Dives book on my...

Yes Jeff, you are exactly right! That is the problem for me.

Thanks SQLRNNR. That's exactly the problem. I didn't realize when using an expression to set the connection string to a variable, that variable needed to be set at design time...

Thanks for the great ideas!

I think I'll try creating the tally table on the fly approach. I'm afraid my process might not be able to access master in production, so...

Perfect. I'll try option 3 first and see how it goes. If I have memory issues, I'll fall back to option 2.

Thanks!

My Bad! Rodrigo was exactly right! I chose the wrong option. I'm back in business

THANK YOU!!

This ALMOST works, but unfortunately, the installer will not allow me to upgrade the instance. Probably because it's already on the correct "version". I need to upgrade the "edition" NOT...

So if anyone else is interested. Here's the end product, and it seems to be working well.

First of all, I found what seems to be simple, reliable tsql base64 encoding/decoding...