Nice article Tom, a little note about agents from a fellow contractor:

Many companies seem genuinely shocked when the newly arrived contractor fails to meet expectations. How could an agency possibly...

Jeff Moden (3/14/2008)

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I appreciate the feedback, Johan...

The problem is that most of the Devs nowadays are really GUI programmers that learned just enough SQL to be able to do necessarily...

right('0000000000000' + cast(number_col as varchar), 13)

I know...

It would probably help if i spelt his name properly

Kirk Haselden

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Integration Services

ISBN-10: 0672327813

ISBN-13: 978-0672327810

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Microsoft-Server-2005-Integration-Services/dp/0672327813/ref=pd_bbs_sr_3?ie=UTF8&s=gateway&qid=1200495678&sr=8-3

antonio.collins (1/16/2008)

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re: Samuel Vella

that query does not seem to only consider sellers who have sold at least 3 items in each of the past 3 months. have i misinterpreted...

you can write the query like this

Select 'Col1name' as [ColumnName], col1 as [Value] from table

union all

Select 'Col2name' as [ColumnName], col2 as [Value] from table

union all

Select 'Col3name' as [ColumnName], col3 as...

technically there is no need, it was just for demonstration purposes 🙂

Did you have a look at the execution plans? It did look like it was more optimal to go...

I'll warn you now... it does require a fair bit of patience, although extremely powerful it has certain character traits (ie flaws) which you'll need to get used to. Having...

SSIS (SQL Server Integration Services) is an ETL (Extraction, transform, Loading) tool which can take data from a huge number of sources, modify it any way possible and then load...

a slightly different approach using top 3 and order by to get the top 3 months.

I also limited the query to only count up to 4 months in the past,...

Jeff,

(Did you miss my earlier posts?)

Case would be a lot easier for very simple examples but sometimes @nbr is derived and for clarity/optimization it would be better to avoid the...

for larger number of columns - copy and paste the header row into your select command, then you can find and replace the pipe symbol with ],[ and then finish...

an ideal task for SSIS (or DTS if you're using 2000)

in 2005

in the object tree

- right click the table

- select script as

- select INSERT to

- select your prefered output

I'm sure theres something similar in 2000

If thats...