I am at the end of a long day. Looking at your code my head hurts.

How about some help in understanding how this monster works ?

The key question of recursion is in which cases is it the best approach ?

I remember the infamous factorial example - convenient to use to explain recursion in this very...

Yes it was ... ;-). Your help is most appreciated. Contributions such as yours are what makes this forum great.

It took me 0,5 sec to realize that your solution...

Hit the nail right on the head. (Of course the "initiator" ; is required before the with:-))

Thank you !

The problem was as follows:

UPDATE t1

SET IsLatestContract =

CASE

...

Thank you, half-way there. The main table still has to be * updated * with the result set, i.e. it is needed to identify, for each customer, which is its...

A bit of nit-picking for improvement:

Instead of using SUBSTRING to retrieve the last character why one simply use RIGHT(<expr>, 1) ?

Thank you for the starting point. Now I should be able to raise my level of knowledge (one of the raison d'être of the forum).

Regards

Though a bit rude, my comment was actually intended to prompt (invite ?) a clarification because I am interested in what appeared to be a somewhat arcane topic I never...

I suppose it is great for someone who knows what this is all about.

This article stands out as the driest of them all, without any introduction or explanation of what...

Thank you all for your assistance.

My solution looks amateurish next to yours - I had a second insert based on the results of the first insert selecting only where there...

Good call on that one!

I was more thinking of the "main" tables like Customer, Contact, Invoice. No duplication issues there.

And yes, I agree that there is still work to be done for "reference" tables...

If two offices of an organization used the same application each maintaining its own database, then at a later time the two databases could be merged without any risk of...

I agree. GUIDs have their place and sometimes are totally unavoidable. They can be incredibly painful to your system if not handled correctly. But what I find is they are...