Thank you. I'll keep all of this in mind.

Jeff,

That's some interesting insight. I don't think I would have necessarily thought updating one was more important than updating the other. I'll make sure to ensure statistics get updated frequently...

Thanks so much for the explanations! Very helpful.

I'm going to work on all of the items in your and Jeff's recommendations.

Thank you both for your replies. A few follow-up questions:

Regarding cost threshold, I've read many articles that suggest 50 is a good starting point. However, some of the queries and...

These are really great suggestions. I'm looking forward to trying them next week. Thanks so much!

I should have clarified. If it's part of a CTE, I can use a Tally table. I'm trying to avoid adding a physical table to the database as it's a...

Got it. Thanks so much!

frederico_fonseca (4/22/2016)

---

will the following satisfy your need for simplicity?

create view [table_normalized]

as

select t1.PersonID

, t1.col_name

, t1.col_value

from ( select t1.PersonID

...

Frederico,

That's an interesting approach. Am I correct in assuming that I'd need to create a case statement containing every possibility for field names across all of the tables I have...

Thanks, Sergiy.

That would reduce the number of views I'd have to create, but I think it'd be a similar amount of typing in anything that joins to the view. For...

Kristen,

Thanks. That doesn't exactly produce the results I'm looking for but what if I split the string into rows based on a delimiter (e.g., the "#" sign). Then, each row...

I might be able to use the wildcard character. Maybe I'm just over complicating a simple problem but how might you extract the values that aren't matched by the pattern...

This is incredibly helpful. Thank you for your input!!

Thanks, Eirikur!

I see what you're doing but I'm not sure how I can use that last column to determine the overlap of fields between reports. Perhaps I'm missing something. Can...

Yes, that is it! I get consistent results when I'm more specific in the ORDER BY clause.

Thank you!

Mike