Are you using the Import Wizard in Management Studio? Or an SSIS package? Or something else?

Normal varchar can go up to 8000 characters if you define it that way. Varchar(max) can go up to 2 Gig (approximately 2 billion characters).

Personally, I use XQuery (nodes, et al) consistently. Haven't used OpenXML in years. Prefer XQuery for performance, ease-of-use, etc.

There are ways to put more robust error handling into scripts like that, but I'm not suggesting them because they'd take a lot of editing, and you don't have time/resources...

patrickmcginnis59 (1/15/2013)

---

Let me try working through a few variables on this one!

If the interviewee is going to fool a completely competent and prepared interviewer, he's going to fool the SQL...

The only real benefit, in my experience (about 12 years now), to table variables over temp tables, is that an explicit rollback command won't roll back data changes in a...

Yeah, it's pretty safe to ignore the rabid weasle Joe in this instance. Nothing he wrote here actually has any value to the discussion. (Sometimes it does, and...

koln (1/15/2013)

---

Thanks guys...I like that merge function, and I will read up a bit more.

Overall, I only want this trigger to fire when a row is added or a row...

It should look something like this:

CREATE TRIGGER [dbo].[Joe_trigger] ON [dbo].[TableA]

AFTER INSERT, UPDATE

AS

BEGIN;

UPDATE B

...

majorbloodnock (1/15/2013)

---

GSquared (1/15/2013)

---

majorbloodnock (1/15/2013)

---

Gary Varga (1/15/2013)

---

A reasonable interview will test deeper understanding, however, the biggest problem is that some interviews are conducted so poorly these people that "learn by cramming"...

GO is a batch separator, not a T-SQL command, so it really doesn't work that way. That's why you can change to something other than "GO" in your SSMS...

arnipetursson (1/15/2013)

---

Be careful in using @ type temporary tables.

The optimizer has no statistics on @ tables and assumes it has ONE row.

Even if you put a primary key on it,...

Is this something you need to automate so it can be repeated, or something you need to do once (or infrequently)?

The best method will depend on the answer to that...

There are details here on what virtual files are and how they work: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms179355(v=SQL.105).aspx

You have to give a table variable an alias in order to do this kind of thing.

DECLARE @MyTable TABLE

...