Grant Fritchey (5/16/2008)

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But, do it this way, and the execution time decreases radically. The number of reads is slightly higher though... for whatever that's worth:

SELECT a.[AddressID],

...

When I'm stuck like this, I usually go crazy with commenting out code until I get to something that does work.

So in this case, I'd recommend commenting out everything...

Matt Miller (5/9/2008)Actually - the "first pass" you talk about would only conceptually happen when there is NO appropriate supporting indexes. with the appropriate indexing - the top levels of...

Grant Fritchey (5/7/2008)

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I've been staying out of this one, but I have to agree with Jeff. The more you practice writing set based queries the easier they get. Add to...

Jeff Moden (5/6/2008)No... no Reporting Services or Excel required. Take a peek in Books Online for "cross-tab reports" in SQL Server 2000 or follow the following URL...

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa172756(sql.80).aspx

They're very effective,...

Jeff Moden (5/6/2008)

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Ummm... you certainly don't need a cursor to transpose a table. Cross-tabs, dynamic cross-tabs, and the occasional use of the Pivot function do the job in a...

Jeff Moden (5/6/2008)

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Ummm... you certainly don't need a cursor to transpose a table. Cross-tabs, dynamic cross-tabs, and the occasional use of the Pivot function do the job in a...

GilaMonster (5/6/2008)

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Then you're asking for SQL injection.

If I may suggest...

Look into moving code into stored procs and calling with parameters. It's a far more secure way of doing things.

How...

Jeff Moden (5/6/2008)

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dfalso (5/6/2008)

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{I was encouraged to discuss my position a little better}

I'll attempt to give an example to illustrate (btw, this also illustrates a candidate for an appropriate use...

{I was encouraged to discuss my position a little better}

I'll attempt to give an example to illustrate (btw, this also illustrates a candidate for an appropriate use of cursors):

Think about...

JJ B (5/2/2008)

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I certainly would rather use CSV for transfering data/communicating between databases/servers any time just because it is a million times easier and faster to create, human-read, and code-read.

So,...

GSquared (5/2/2008)

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I have to agree with Jeff's point, specifically because the context is an interview.

If I were interviewing a potential DBA, and asked a silly question like this, the whole...

Jeff, I appreciate both your and Grant's replies. I also appreciate your concerns about something that's written for a small situation now, but for whatever reason is used in a...

Jeff Moden (5/1/2008)

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Lot's of good thoughts there... but instead of going through all that, why not just write good setbased code that will be performant and scalable all the time?...

I know I'm very late to the game (wasn't reading this board last year, sorry). And first, let me say I had a good time reading through everyone's approach at...