@peter-2

Thanks for the feedback. I've run the test several different ways (current way posted, putting values into a table variable, and single execution statements) and found they produced...

mark hutchinson (5/25/2011)

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@Jeff

Here's an idea to kick around for varchar(max) data...use a tally table (or cte equivalent) to split the very large string into strings less than 8000 characters and...

Another fantastic RBAR article by the director of DAR, Department of Anti-RBAR!

One drawback with Itzik-Style Cross-Joins going out to E8 is making sure you limit E8's results as soon as...

Jeff Moden (6/14/2011)

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COALESCE can change the datatype of the result based on which non-null element is selected (which can cause a major performance problem, BTW). ISNULL will keep the...

They are interchangeable. Both are the same thing except COALESCE() allows for more than one evaluation.

Chris,

Thanks for directing my attention. While I didn't have a DefaultLog value in the registry, I added it and restarted SQL to have it fixed. I'm still not sure why...

Jeff Moden posted a very nice article about CSV parsing. His code was written for a max input string of 8K so if you need more, stay tuned for an...

As promised, I did some testing (sorry it took this long). This was run from my laptop in a Win2K3 Server VM. The results showed a pretty consistent run time...

Craig Sunderland (3/7/2011)

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Surely other factors like CPU, Memory and Disk Configuration could affect these timings, hence why from my tests the XML was a better fit. There probably isn't one...

Interesting about the varying times with smaller sets of data. I'll do some testing and see what I can find.

We've found good use of the following tally table and UDF. It handles empty elements and works fast for us. We've done large and small sets against it.

CREATE TABLE...

Go...

cengland0 (11/23/2010)

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Doh, I just discovered the maximum key length is 900 bytes so combining two VARCHAR(500) columns into one index results in a warning:

The maximum key length is 900 bytes....

I'm finishing up on a re-write of our import process. We import millions of rows through a Visual FoxPro app from the employee's computer. It can import CSV, fixed length,...

It sounds like you're trying to make backups of your DB by using a simple file copy and paste. I wouldn't recommend you rely on that kind of backup unless...