What a useful trick, and definitely something I'll need to remember.

However, I think the function has a bug.  When I put through either of the following...

SELECT

Gernerally speaking: don't use cursors.

However, there are occasions where cursors *may* be faster (or of negligible difference) - these include STATIC cursors or a small number of iterations.

But if you can...

Literally, "no", that's not the case (to avoid thinking that LEFT JOIN + WHERE = INNER JOIN.)  It's just that with this *particular* example that is what happens.

If you had...

The "WHERE DATE bit" will filter the rows out.  Basically, NULL will not be in the date range and will be filtered out by the WHERE clause.

You could try something...

Regardless of how many suppliers you have, if your switchboard blows up (as ours did recently) you won't get any power into the building at all.

In short, there's a heap...

Forgive my laymans terms (and someone could explain this better than I) but it has to do with the order that the SELECT, JOIN, FILTER and COUNT parts take place.

If...

I'm probably missing something here, but for @@CPU_BUSY BOL states that it "Returns the time in milliseconds ... that the CPU has spent working since Microsoft® SQL Server™ was last started." ...

I use float as this is the same underlying data structure used to store datetime datatypes (something I picked up from SQLServerCentral but I have no supporting documentation so that's my...

There's a button in MgmtStudio as well, but you need to customise your toolbar and add it.  It's something of a large button, and it says quite clearly "Hide Results...

"prof reading" should have been "proof reading"

Sorry, I couldn't resist. 

That wasn't an issue in this particular case.  Being an ad hoc process it is only going to be running once at any given time: in the production environment it...

By "orphaned temp tables" I mean temp tables in tempdb that no longer have any connecting processes/sessions/etc.  I know they are dropped when the connection terminates, and when I first...

"Recently I came across a highly transactional DB with no FK's! The data integrity was managed by the front-end application."

I've seen this also.  The ERP system was designed to...