I wrote in my opening statement that I used Import Wizard and in resulting table there are no 'duplicates'

last evening I used bulk insert to import the .txt file and...

Yes, thanks. I did this and it was solution.

Thanks! I put a send mail task in case file not there, else there would be a hard failure which isn't nice, you're right.

pietlinden, in the end, the approach I took was to create the portion of the filename that holds the date using functions and concatenate it to the part of the...

Hi, just want to let you know that I got around to reimporting my files and on to adding indexes to the resulting tables which comprised a schema.

The suggestions offered...

Serg, It works quickly against sample data but against real life database I cancelled this query after 4 minutes 41 seconds because it didn't return anything.

I think I...

Serg,

The actual life tables are similar to what I initially posted, with the exception that dim_lead doesn't actually contain latitude and longitude columns. I'm don't know why I...

ps. serg, thanks for showing me how the LEFT JOIN is redundant. appreciate.

Erirukur,

the reason I use your query is because it doesn't eliminate lead records having a NULL value in the lead_city column. The top query of *my* final UNION...

eirikur, the query you provided is good. Not sure it performs faster in myenvironment tho. Once query execution plan is cached it's about same, but it is still better in...

well, I'm so excited to have gotten these quality answers and will be literally happily pouring over them in my free times today. thanks so much.

Ah, that is exactly awesome! Thanks Scott!

I'm going to use Scott Pletcher's answer....Works for me!

if someone says it's not perfect, can you give more info?

...

hm, you can't store formatted values in DATETIME variables. good to know there's reason for trouble and it's root reason.

any others like that?

Thanks Jeff!!!