First of all marwa, congratulations on sticking your head over the parapet and being brave enough to post an article on SQL Server Central; sharing knowledge is how people learn.

Having...

Also can't find the SQL.

In the absence of this I'm trying to understand the silhouetting explanation. How is the result in the range -1 to 1? Are the distances...

Alan B. - Welcome to the discussion. Things have moved on while I've been sleeping in the UK Just to point out that in my case the CTEs were...

Out of interest were you able to get an estimated execution plan?

That is strange. As Old Hand mentioned re-writing to use sub-queries that filter should produced the same execution plan for simple CTEs.

I would also flag up that using query hints...

Ben and jhood,

I fell foul of too many articles along the lines of "Look at CTEs, they're fantastic" which never mentioned possible performance issues. That was the reason I posted...

My experience was also in a BI system. Where two updates based on recursive CTEs took over 20 mins, using a temp table reduced it to 15 seconds.

The code was...

Just worth pointing out that CTEs against large tables can be very slow; something I have had first hand experience of.

Here is an alternative method that proved much more performant...

Andrew Watson-478275 (3/7/2014)

TV, I'd agree; however I've just...

I first read it when I was about 12 and it didn't seem that bad (I'm a bit older now:Whistling:) - maybe I need to blow the dust off the...

Jennifer Levy (3/5/2014)

And (I know there has been talk about this for years, but...) they REALLY need to do Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. But only...

Can't believe Eddings is/are getting so many mentions, but no one has put forward Feist.

markradley (2/28/2014)

The Belgariad and Malloreon by Eddings would also make a good film series I think. I...