Thanks for all your coments so far, your help is invaluable.

Here is a bit more information abour our system:

We have a dual processor win2k server with 2gb of ram.   Drives...

Obviously it depends on how you intend to use the data in order to define the best model, but I would make Table 2 a cross reference table with 2...

Mike & Chris,

Thanks for these comments, you have both given me some new areas to research.  We are not afraid to do a fair amount of re-writing of the...

We have a constant program of optimisation and re-working of the code to improve performance, but any extra speed increace we can get is would be welcomed. 

Lol,  we have found (at least in our app) that the rounding errors when summed tend to cancel each other out, so there is no great fortune to be made! ...

Hi!

We have found that sticking to the decimal data type gives us the accuracy we require, as floats often gave very inaccurate results when using in iterative calculations.  Decimals bring...

Thanks rsnorris, that is an excellent idea, we will investigate this further.

Thanks for the responses.  I'm not sure that msforeachDB will work, because as well as the client specific databases, there are other databases which contain shared data, system stuff etc...

The danger of copy and pasting from Excel is that there may be a number that is formatted with commas in it, e.g. 1,000,000.00 which will throw off your routine...

I don't know if this is of any help, but I have got round the problem of not being able to assign values to text data type variables by using...

Or simpler still, you could replace the select statement with

SELECT

     COALESCE (SPAM.Memofield, CHIPS.Memofield, BEANS.Memofield, EGG.Memofield, EXTRASPAM.Memofield)

FROM

     (SELECT * From Source WHERE UniqueID = 1) AS SPAM,

     (SELECT * From Source...

If I am understanding you correctly, then a case statement should work.

Here is a simple example of how you might use it; this example should return "hello3", which is the...

We've seen a lot of performance gain by using a temporary tables

You could use one in place of MASMEDIA, select the data you want to update into it at the start,...

In other words, does the answer mean use software locks?  The website the correct answer suggests shows C functions, and not stuff built into SQL Server.  Does SQL Server have...