Nope - you made yourself perfectly clear. The problem is that you have come to the conclusion the best solution uses a cursor,...

DECLARE @result AS VARCHAR(1000)

SELECT @result = COALESCE(@result + ', ') + dummy_column

FROM ...

Yeah - I learned a few...

BTW - I'll wait in the hope someone else can think of a better solution before I try writing the abortion of a query I have in mind....

I can only imagine a design & requirement like that can be due to a serious flaw, most likely lack of normalisation. This is a horrible problem to solve. Can...

Developer has all the features of Enterprise but cannot be used for production work. The difference between it and Enterprise is simply a matter of licensing. Looking up the difference...

Part of the reason I picked that one is it's the only I can think of off-hand I know anything about 😉

I suppose if it was me I would concentrate on the lazy writer. It does at least give some context to other more familiar SQL Server topics however without a...

Agreed. Assuming you are reasonably new to SQL Server this is an extremely odd topic - any sort of depth on this would be considered 300, probably 400 level. If...

Thanks Gail. I had a feeling there was some change like that but reckoned it was enough to get the guy started!

Um, that's a bit of an open question. You really could do with being more specific. As a start you look at the results of sp_who2 and investigate those process...

Paul White NZ (10/12/2010)

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Quite possibly, but now I have to show you ISNULL being 'SARGed'...

IF OBJECT_ID('Tempdb..#sargTest') IS...

The OP is gonna hate us when (s)he checks back in to get a nice, straightforward answer to their nice, straightforward question 😛

WayneS (10/12/2010)

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I would think that for the evaluation of IS NULL, it would depend greatly on the distribution of data... if you have a million plus rows of data with...

Brad McGhee did in 2007, and he's no thicky pants.

I wonder if in previous versions the engine used...