Thanks you all for the input, even if it was mostly "there aren't any hole-in-one solutions". I'll talk with our DBAs about the viability of using merge replication.

Thanks, Lowell.

All three data centers are full read/write instances of SQL, each processing their own data, and serving it up when a load balancer directs web traffic to that data...

Online index rebuilds are nice, but they're only on the enterprise version of the db (IIRC). If you have an environment with that, they're nice to use. The drawback is...

If I understand your question correctly (and I'm not sure I do), you have a certain number of users, and you want to, presumably on some sort of round-robin basis,...

Or if you prefer the pivot syntax (which lets face it, nobody does)....

;with t (SID, _Name, Data) as

(

select 1, 'Name', 'Joe' union all

...

It's just casting the number to a string. You can make any number into a string, but you can only turn valid number strings into numbers.

I saw a question posted on StackOverflow which puzzled me. This is NOT an argument against fully qualifying table names, but just curiosity about an oddity of the feature.

You can...

Jeff Moden (1/23/2015)

---

....I'd say that it would be better to just lock the whole table rather than doing this in an explicit transaction if you can afford the luxury of...

An elegant solution. I'll try scaling it up and see how it performs. Thanks, Dwain!

You'll have to write out the possible columns individually. If you have lots of columns, you could script out the statement against something like sys.columns for the table. If you...

It's still not clear what you're trying to get at here. What do you mean differences in column 2 and 3? Are you referring to the columns Grade and Sec?...

Please provide table structure and sample data.

Inner join the two tables together on their keys, and additionally filter on records where the fields you choose don't match.

;with a as

(

select myKey = 1,...

Just something like this?

declare @RID int, @p1 int, @p2 int, @p3 int, @p4 int, @p5 int

declare @targetTable table

(

_key int,

_value int

)

insert into @targetTable...

Everything said here was spot on. You're probably best doing this in a lookup table of sorts. That said, here is an example of the sort of "hard coding" Grant...