I believe that by definition a function that is used to set/retrieve a constant should be used as you've shown.

Putting my mis-shaped, ill-fitting programmer hat on, isn't it standard practice...

The only real problem with this approach is that you have a lot of disk access as SQL Server might have to repetitively get the same value over and over...

A much more efficient version is available here,

http://philcart.blogspot.com/2007/06/split-function.html

It uses varchar(max), so you're not limited in how many values are passed. Doesn't use a loop, so the number of values passed...

Chung, I started doing a series of articles for DTS on my blog (http://philcart.blogspot.com/search/label/DTS), but I shelved it after looking at the Package Configurations in SQL Server 2005...

Storing packages in SQL Server, or as structured storage files is not a big issue. An advantage for storing in SQL Server is that you can transfer packages between servers...

Nice article.

Myself, I prefer developing the package to allow easy migration, rather than designing a system to do the migration.

In DTS terms, I usually use a database table that holds...

Congrats Steve, it does only seem a short time ago that we reached 400,000. With the new site I can see the growth only going upwards.

Remi, did you do the...

Actually, can you assign applicable points to different forums? ie: make posts in the SQL Server forums +1 and post in non-SQL Server forums (editorials and such) +0??

That would cover...

Lawrence, Grab hold of the DMVStats application from http://www.codeplex.com

The reports it uses do database inserts, etc...

I particularly like the report that allows you to enable/disable SQL Agent...

If you have the disk space, then it might be an idea to not shrink the log. Then it won't have to grow again, which adds to the time of...

Change your output to Text.

Change the options to show results as Tab-Delimited.

Run your query.

Copy the results.

Paste in Excel.

Rinse and repeat 🙂

How are you embedding the spreadsheet? What format is your email, plain-text or HTML?

You might be better served attaching the spreadsheet to the email, or getting your results in HTML...

Backup the database from the old server and restore it to a different database on the new server.

Then you can do a simple outer join between the tables and insert...

If you're brave, you can check the subscription status in the ReportServer database and email when the subscription fires. You could poll the table from a SQL Agent job.

If you're...

Hope you're not trying to create an extract file in Reporting Services. Something like DTS, SSIS or BCP is better suited to that and you can specify your own seperator.