Geesh; that's an obscure one.  Good question!

 If I may offer a suggestion to Loner's query and Lynn's correction:

DECLARE @dtCheck datetime
SET @dtCheck = DATEADD(hour, -24, GetDate())

SELECT t.pk_ticket, t.company, t.createdate
FROM hd_ticket t
    INNER JOIN (SELECT fk.ticket, MIN...

OK, no problem.  Since another poster had pointed it out, and you had not refuted it, I was trying to emphasize it.

Be sure the directory has proper permissions. The directory will...

CSDunn; I beleive you describe a good case for use the correlated sub-query instead of the join, as I described in my previous post.  I think you will see that...

BOL defines the SQL Server Error log as "logs certain system events and user-defined events".  What it does is log events (errors and informational) based on the messages severity level. ...

Depending on your data and query, it will likely be much more efficient to use a computed column to store the time difference in the table itself.

ALTER TABLE Mytable
     ADD ElapsedTime...

And, showing there is more than one way to skn a cat, you can also use OPENROWSET or OPENDATASOURCE.

Look in BOL at Importing and Exporting Bulk Data

Hope this helps

To simply answer your question, you do not have any wildcard character in your Like pattern.  You probably just need to make your query:

SELECT * FROM users where USERNAME  LIKE...

You COULD declare your sproc parms to be varchar(max size) (which is 8096 in SQL 2000, or varchar(MAX) in SQL 2005), then retrieve the size from the INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS view and enforce...

To describe it a little further, your statement "retrieving all of a customer's orders, even with an index on customerID, could result in a table scan " is not likely. ...

No, you can have spaces in file name, this isn't DOS 3.11.

The message indicates it cannot create the file.  It does not say why, just that the OS cannot do...

Without the rest of your query or more explanation of what you are trying to provide, it is a little difficult to help.  But let me provide a few thoughts...

I believe that the SQL Query optimizer is smart enough to build and cache a single plan when the queries are the same or similar, even with an IF statement. ...

DECLARE @SpreadSelect as int

SELECT @SpreadSelect = 0

IF @SpreadSelect = 0

SELECT AcctNo

FROM _FinalFlat

WHERE

(SpreadFile IN (1, 9) )

ELSE

SELECT AcctNo

FROM _FinalFlat

WHERE

(SpreadFile IN (0, 2) )

Same in VB and VBScript.

Set is used for assigning objects.  And actually, it is LET that is used for assigning native datatypes (like date, integer, string, etc).  But Let...