Just a thought: TOP is a reserved word in T-SQL and is not part of ANSI-99-SQL. If for some unexplained and undoubtedly ridiculous reason your company changes databases or you work...

Rob I agree that if you truly want to guarantee the order in which the rows are returned you must use ORDER BY. This covers the cases where the...

“ORDER BY is important because relational theory specifies that the rows in a result set cannot be assumed to have any sequence unless ORDER BY is specified. ORDER...

Ron

One of the most critical factors in a RDBMS is the speed with which it can return data. Logically ordered data is faster to...

SqlIndia I would suggest that this funciton would work better on the client than on the server. You might want to look at the FileSystem Object in ASP,VB,C++ and Java (not...

This works but you must insert a dummy row or insert at least one row of new data.

HTH MIke

USE TEST

DECLARE @NewSeed int

SELECT @NewSeed = max(employeeid) FROM Employees

TRUNCATE TABLE Employees

SET...

Since you are using vchar data to store your dates you might want to consider one of these methods of formating your data

HTH Mike

DECLARE @vDT VarChar(200)

SET @vDT = '5/12/2005'

SELECT convert(DateTime,@vDT)...

Now() is used in both EXCEL and ACCESS to return the current date and time.

But it is undocumented in T-SQL a sure road to trouble.

HTH Mike

There is some very good informaton located here http://www.sqlservercentral.com/columnists/gvijayakumar/whentousetheorderbyclause.asp

on INDEXEs. Since you have a clustered index you do not need the ORDER BY CLAUSE as your data is already...

Ron, Remi I try to give credit when credit is due it keeps you guys posting great answers. Ron thanks for suggesting a great soultion that you gleaned from Remi's post. ...

A Variable length character string uses only enough bytes to actually hold the data. You can use the DataLength fuction to retrun the actual number of bytes used. Len() can...

The number of columns will have no effect on searching data in a set solution as SQL uses pointers to indexed columns to search the data. These pointers point to  the memory...

Another thought on zip codes is that since they are nominative you can not assume that consective zip codes are geographically connected. If a new post office were to open...

Farrell zip codes are numbers although their function is nominative rather than relational. They are used to descripe areas covered by a Post Office. The first number represents a group...

Sorry I was not clear. my question is does SQL create and store an array of pointers for clustered indexes?

Mike