Update: I tried several different combinations of locks, including (updlock) (xlock paglock) (holdlock). The only lock that prevented a second transaction from potentially inserting a key violation was...

Thank you both for your responses. It seems the answer will involve explicit transaction and explicit locks. I was hoping to avoid that. I know there is...

We have a very similar situation, and are looking forward to upgrading and making use of filtered indexes.

It's not clear to me... did you try using filtered indexes with just...

BTW, I had never heard of CROSS APPLY OR OUTER APPLY until researching this problem. It is a pretty cool addition. I found some language here that was...

That's awesome that it happened to help you (and hopefully others) as well. Of course Matt gets credit for the hard part. I am a frequent reader and...

Ah! I tried something like that, referencing PlayerAddress rather than PlayerAddress/Address and then specifying the path "Address/@AddressType" but I would get an error:

XQuery [value()]: 'value()' requires a singleton (or...

It's interesting that there isn't more responders... I read into that that everyone hates this XML stuff.

From what I can see, what makes this especially difficult is that...

After reading more carefully through this:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/simonince/archive/2009/04/24/flattening-xml-data-in-sql-server.aspx

I was able to construct the following query, that gets the results in a set that I can then easily normalize. I...

I apologize - the XML example I provided was not valid. I attempted to abstract the actual XML because it's much bigger and I wanted to simplify it for...

Oops. Sorry for posting in wrong forum. I did not notice the forum groups. I'll be more careful. Thank you for the suggestion with the table...

thank you but row_number isn't available in sql 2000. I think it was introduced in 2005.

Continuing to search, I see previous sqlservercentral topics, and the prominent answer...

Thanks to both of you. I've used DTS extensively for on-demand data loading, just never thought about scheduling it for a "once a minute" type of transfer of sql...