Thank you all for your answers,

I managed to contact the ex-DBA and got a bit of rational for this trace. The app that uses the DB is an...

Yes, I am aware of the gaps that may present themselves when using identity columns. In this case though, RowNo is a serial number kept in another table that...

Jeff thank you for the advice and the solution. Using John's suggestion I managed to come up with the code that works doing a little brainwork myself.

I will keep in...

thank you very much...

with a minor change to get the order I wanted, it worked perfectly:

SELECT a.keyDate AS DateFrom

,ISNULL(b.keyDate ,GETDATE()) AS DateTo

...

This was a great post and it really connects with the frustration A LOT of people have felt when trying to deal with such issues on corporate structures.

What is reallly...

how about this:

declare @FinalString nvarchar(250)

SET @FinalString=''

SELECT @FinalString = COALESCE(@FinalString + ', ', '') + (CAST([name] AS nvarchar(50)))

FROM Fruit

order by [name]

SELECT REPLACE(@FinalString,'''',' ')

I had the same problem sometime ago. Eventually we created a VPN so things were easy after that.

Anyway there is no reason that you shouldn't be able to to it,...

Access is notorious for its problems working with a lot of users over LANs (I understand though that you will be using it as a front end only).

I have developed...

🙁

the sproc runs in a transaction so trying to save start/end time + other information to a log table in the DB gets rolledback when the query times out......

remember...

I understand that the timeout thing is a client issue because the client decides when to timeout,

but I still need to find the T-sql part that actually takes that...

A follow up for the record gentlemen:

as of a couple of days the stored procedure runs in production with minor modifications and no problems whatsoever.

Thank you again for your help!

Although using the 3 part "Quirky Update" method that Hans' good code has in it certainly helps prevent deadlocks, the code that calls the procedure should never include the procedure...

...I am speechless 🙂

thanks for your input, but how does this handle concurrency? I need to have sequential numbering are you sure this will leave no blanks in the numbering?

what...

Thanx everyone,

that is exactly what I did (select into.....)

The identity columns are preserved on the same instance...

I have never used SSIS - normally for tasks like those I feel...

we faced a similar situation some time ago although not even close to that amount of users and sites. we had to have a central server and 5 remote locations...