Why is it "much easier"?

SELECT @@VERSION

SELECT * FROM sys.dm_os_windows_info

Intellisense supplies @@Version and it's 20 fewer characters to get wrong.

Cool, sorry - I misread your comment ;¬}

The question was "I want to get some data in a SELECT statement, but I don't have a table or view that matches my needs. What can I put into...

I'm afraid I take issue with the question.  I answered CTE because a CTE is neither a table nor a view and

SELECT * FROM MyCte

is perfectly valid.

What Terje said.

I don't understand the answer.  The linked article states:

Permissions

To execute DROP AGGREGATE, at a minimum, a user must have ALTER permission on the schema to which the user-defined aggregate belongs,...

But the quoted text from the docs doesn't say anywhere that a name, data type, and JSON path are required, merely that with_clause contains a list of columns with their...

I've not used this functionality, but the spec. doesn't say to me what the topic suggests:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/functions/openjson-transact-sql?view=sql-server-ver15#with_clause

Thank you both for the time you've taken.  I'm attracted by Jeffrey Williams's solution as it seems to break the unwieldy code into more atomic chunks, which follows good SE...

Thank you Brian.  I believe that the developer who wrote the SQL uses ApexSQL Refactor, but although it's consistent, I find the way the code is laid out hard to...

Can I just say that I really, really dislike the use of Triggers?  I know they have their place, but they are so often improperly documented and, as a consequence,...

Ah thanks.  That explains it all.  I'm going to see if I can't leverage this to do some CSV parsing (I have a task to deal with a bunch of...

WITH
    E1(N) AS (SELECT 1 FROM (VALUES (1),(1),(1),(1),(1),(1),(1),(1),(1),(1))E0(N))

I don't understand this syntax (please note that I'm not a DBA - my day job is...

• This reply was modified 3 years, 10 months ago by  edwardwill.

Thank you so much everyone for your interesting, thoughtful and useful answers and contributions.  I didn't 'leave the building' but I'm in the UK and after work stops, I stop...

I have figured out the answer (I would have deleted the post but I can't see how to do that!)

It needed to be in the format yyyy-MM-ddThh:mm:ssZ.  It now works. ...