Or this:

;WITH CTE AS

(

SELECT E.Company,

E.Employee,

...

I think simply testing for existence should do what you need.

SELECT E.Company,

E.Employee,

E.TermDate

FROM...

Good article. Nice way of selecting all columns when detecting duplicates for a subset of the columns.

So this is your homework?

Is there a maximum number of distinct serial numbers or are there at most 7 like in your example?

I think this might be what you need:

;WITH CTE AS

(

SELECT DISTINCT

SerialBox

...

I just tried it on a bit of xml that had a DataLength of 13859 and it took 3:28 (3 minutes 28 seconds) to complete. I then tried it on...

I tried running it on a bit of xml that stores an order on our database.

It ran for over 6 minutes before I stopped it.

Using a cursor:

DECLARE myCursor cursor LOCAL FORWARD_ONLY FAST_FORWARD READ_ONLY

FOR SELECT OfficeId

FROM dbo.Office

DECLARE @OfficeId int,...

Or using CROSS APPLY:

SELECT OfficeID,

S.StateAbbr,

C.countrynames

FROM dbo.Office O

CROSS APPLY (SELECT TOP(1)

...

A csv list can also be generated using "FOR XML"

I rewrote the final query using this method:

SELECT OfficeID, 
       (SELECT TOP(1)
...

Hi James,

I'm not sure exactly what you are trying to do. Is it that you have a stored procedure that calls an inline table function and it's the inline table...

Yes, thinking about it, the runtime for the all of the methods...

sagesmith (6/18/2013)

---

Please forgive my lack of etiquette.

I am humbly submitting this code for review by the gurus here on this forum. I think it might show that the CURSOR...

I see 😛

It can also be done even more simply with an INNER JOIN and tally table (and is faster than the...