You should read The DailyWTF every day. It is an excellent source of what-not-to-do.

Given the fixed width of the textboxes you have available, I would recommend editing your article to move content to the left.

@jeff

I didn't say "Null was equal to nothing". I wrote that Null was something that "means nothing".

Null is a something that means nothing

If it will be helpful, I recently wrote an article about cleaning up internal spaces from a string in the Office VBA environment (VB classic). As part of my...

since the STD_PrmQual column isn't atomic (= a concatenation of two other columns), I would drop it from the table definition. You can add it back in as an...

I would suggest using a different element name than "a", since that is used for links and anchors.

Your removing duplicate spaces pattern should be ' +'

The pattern in your article only has a single space followed by a plus character. Such a pattern matches one...

@jeff

Did any of your TallyTable approaches use this simplified approach?

content until the first delimiter

UNION ALL

tallytable split rows until the last delimiter

UNION ALL

content after the last delimiter

@Solomon

My transaction range was based on some testing I'd done a long time ago. I'm surprised that a batch Insert transaction would slow/hang at 100. I agree that...

1. generally, you will find that 500-1000 rows/transaction will give the optimal performance. Beyond that, you won't see much performance improvement.

2. doing all 3 million rows in the transaction...

@jeff

Thanks for testing.

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@spam 17205

I think a simpler version might be

SELECT

CustomerID

, SUM(CASE ProductCode WHEN 'A' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) AS cnt_A

, SUM(CASE ProductCode WHEN 'B'...

@ColdCoffee

That is why I used a Having clause

@jeff

I was thinking about something that might look like this:

SELECT DISTINCT p1.CustomerID, Count(p1.CustomerID)

FROM

(Select Distinct CustomerID, ProductCode From #Purchase WHERE ProductCode In ('A', 'B')...

@jeff

Did you compare the speed of this query against one where your first (Group By) From clause is a Select Distinct (sub) query?

Nice article. It builds nicely...