Agree with all of your points but I did qualify my statement by saying that there were other considerations if you need a generic solution. (i.e. compare any two records...

so if you wanted to pass a table name and two record IDs to a function/procedure that would spit out a list of fields with differences and the before/after values,...

If you want a generic solution then you are going to need to use a cursor, sys.colums and probably some executable SQL to build what is effectively the pivoted data...

@ Kevin,

You can't leave a statement like that hanging 🙂  You need to explain WHY it is a bad idea.

I don't think there is one. Just someone sharing code that might save you half a day.

If you are deleting the majority of the table, you may find it more performant to copy the records to DO want to a new (temp) table and then truncate...

Thanks guys,

I indeed edit the package by hand.  i.e. view in code (rather than use the properties) and set the text qualifier to empty string. I just know...

you could just do it with nested REPLACE() functions.  I have only done the first two ([ and @). You would need to be careful with the % as that...

Assuming all employees are in the same table and have a parent_ID field to point up the tree then you are probably looking at a recursive CTE

You will...

would love to but our network is screwed down so tight there isn't a drive I have access to that is big enough

Thanks Sue,

TLS/LS - My bad 🙂

You are right on all counts.  I ended up turning off the existing LS and starting again. I completely agree that...

+1 for using SSIS - it comes as part of the implementation for all versions of SQL other than Express.

Loading data from a CSV file is a pretty...

You are very nearly there.  Try to think of the problem as two separate steps:
1) How do I find the last date in the system
2) How do I...

Thanks guys, I din't post the entire query because it is currently over 800 lines long and uses a number of correlated sub-queries (converting to CTEs to make it easier...

Does this help?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2076715/challenge-how-to-implement-an-algorithm-for-six-degree-of-separation

It sounds like the same root problem. If you can solve it efficiently, I am sure that Facebook would love to hear from you...