First of all, thanks for your help.

Maybe I didn't make it clear, my excel file is under \\remoteServer\public\Sub Folder\, when I exec xp_cmdshell, nothing returned, but returned a list of...

I think the problem is that the actual sub folder name has a space, and xp_cmdshell doesn't like it

it says "The system cannot find the file specified."

no "Access Denied" message returned.

it says Volume in drive \\remoteserver\public\ has no label... etc. and one row says "file not found" what does that mean?

I actually tried to add the sql login to the share\path\file on the remoteServer, and gave it a full control, but still didn't work. Yes, everybody is in the...

Thanks for your advice. My fact table includes all invoice level info, and don't see big performance impact so far.

Great. Thanks.

1) all values are random, no specific pattern

2) in my real world, col3 is char(4)

thanks guys.

after I ran dbcc updateusage, the msg said something like:

USED pages: Changed from (1444) to (968) pages.

...

thanks guys.

florian.reischl, in your second query,

SELECT *

FROM @customer c

LEFT JOIN @order o ON c.id = o.customer_id AND c.name LIKE '%Duck'

is the...

Thanks to all of you

florian.reischl, your example is exactly what happened at my work. The query needs to join 6 tables together (I agree, it's very difficult to read...

Thanks. Is there any case that we need to put the WHERE condition in FROM? I have a developer did it, and I am not convinced he could...

how about multiple levels of view? we have tables created from 7 or 8 levels of views....

Thank you guys, it worked beautifully in my code.