Not quite a cursor and somewhat serial a solution (but still some of the glory of a set based solution):

Run a query to create a separate OSQL (or BCP) command line...

Do an outer join to find those not there,  for example

select a.id

from tbl1 a

     LEFT OUTER JOIN tbl2 b on a.id=b.id

where b.id is null

will return only ids from rows in tbl1 that...

"cross join" Doh!

I confess the stupid modern join syntax is a second language to those like me that have been doing SQL since before the alphabet was invented.

I don't know.  I've only ever used SQLprofiler traces to determine this, so short of using an ongoing trace. 

But, in my experience it's never been a long time.

Unless you...

Your description is still fuzzy, and you have no sample data, but here's what I do when faced with trickiness problems:

#1 Encapsulate in a stored proc.  That is, don't plan...

Use a join to get a cartesian of all

insert into ...

select b.itemid, a.custid

from customers a

       join items b on 1=1

Add a filter for one cust or add the other...

Yeah, there's this little message that occurs when compiling out of (dependent) sequence procs in SQL2k.  It says right there that sysdepends ain't gonna be updated because one of the objects...

That's effectively how it would work best.  What I'd do different is encapsulate the string parsing in a reusable function though--  e.g. StringField( string, delimiter, positionnumber) to extract the substrings.

(There...

see the T-SQL REPLACE function in the help file

make a udf that returns a 1 or 0 (Y or N)

give it parameters:

   check_date

   include_or_exclude I/E

   from_year_no  0,####

   to_year_no  0,####

   from_month_no  0,1-12

   to_month_no    0,1-12

   from_dom_no  0,1-31

   to_dom_no    0,1-31

  ...

I say pay the price for the design that doesn't anticipate changes like this.

But why do complex search and replace when you can do it only once?

Why not do the...

Maybe it's because I've been a consultant for so many years, I've gotten the opportunity to see so many different permutations of designs and problems...

One case where DRI bogged massively...

Hey, I agree with the developers that it degrades performance.  I hate DRI.  I have seen it bog things down unbelievably.

However, in my applications all data modifications happen in stored...

But, both Database and Log backups have to be from the same server/database.

yes.

It's only in your RESTORE statement that you say that you're done (finished with th restore) or there's more (log backups) still to come (in your restoration process).

See RESTORE, and...