Document your servers, including provisioning (prod/QA/test/dev), version, patch-level, etc., in a table. I have a database called "DBA" that I use for that kind of thing.

Comes in useful pretty...

This can turn into a complex question. The rule-of-thumb that I try to follow on things like this is: The more clever the solution has to be, the worse...

Jeff Moden (6/14/2016)

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GSquared (6/14/2016)

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Jeff Moden (6/10/2016)

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Eric M Russell (6/10/2016)

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I'm not saying that string manipulation is a bad...

Two data flow tasks. Each with a "check for the file" step, or a "for each" loop for the file type.

Keep it simple.

I just tested a Calendar table version against the UDFs defined here.

Calendar table was consistently about 10X faster.

I've used that plan (or variations on it) many times.

Just keep in mind that the table may have locks, etc., on it that will cause this to bomb.

If possible, set...

There's an easy way to use For XML Path to turn a set of rows into a list. For some reason, this site isn't letting me post a sample...

Lowell (6/14/2016)

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it also looks to me like you could combine the WHERE statement into a single query, that might be more efficient too:

aww nevermind, i didn't notice the IS NOT...

I wouldn't do this in an SQL function. I'd put it as a column in a Calendar table and have it pre-calculated and queriable.

Use Calendar tables for this kind...

I queried your sample Fields XML. It seems pretty straightforward.

I took out the rs namespace from the sample, and added a root so it would be well-formed, but the...

Eric M Russell (6/14/2016)

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GSquared (6/14/2016)

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I do ask trick questions. One of my standard tech-screening questions is:

And here's the trick question: You have two tables, A and B, and you...

For this, I'd use a many-to-many table with a HierarchyID datatype column that allowed each person to be in multiple hierarchies.

Or will you have depths greater than about 400 nodes?...

I do ask trick questions. One of my standard tech-screening questions is:

And here's the trick question: You have two tables, A and B, and you want all the rows...

Jeff Moden (6/10/2016)

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Eric M Russell (6/10/2016)

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I'm not saying that string manipulation is a bad question. It's just...

I'm not sure I understand exactly what you're doing, but it sounds like you could use a Sequence object and just Concat() it onto the end of the string and...