Thanks, Jack your response, and the links, proved very informative.

So, if I understand correctly, a good index will likely speed up the update process, but have no bearing on the insert?

Jack, how so? I am not familiar enough with indexes to understand your point. Will they have to be rebuilt after a truncate?

Noman - I have run into something very similar to this in some of the processes we run, after doing some exhaustive searches I found a combination of a few...

Good point.

For the OP:

I started thinking about how, as an interviewer I would find questions to ask. I would need them to be fairly short with clear, known to be...

90%?!?

I'm not disagreeing with you, as I see similar situations in other walks of life, but sheesh, doesn't that just blow your mind? Maybe I have been thinking worst case...

And I would be the first to agree with you, which is why I applied for my current position.

However, speaking from what life experience I have, I can tell...

It's 3pm on a Friday, your production OLTP environment is down, every hour down costs the company one million dollars. People are phoning constantly, folks are rushing the hallways, running...

I'm figuring that you already inserted the individual student data since you mentioned:

Looking at these results and the columns you are...

I wrote a moving explanation and it wandered off into the ether, the general idea was this: Swap your between statement around. The code I used, slightly altered from yours...

No idea if SS 2k is any different, however, I have solved a similar issue in the past using an identity column. Just grouping on a unique column prior to...

I have run into a similar problem in the past, if you can get rid of the "not" in the statement, it should speed up considerably. I realize it takes...

I have searched far and wide for a solution to this myself. Unfortunately unless you create your own report viewer you can't change it.

Also, I have no idea how...

Sure thing. When I set it up it usually looks something like this:

SELECT col1,col2,col3 FROM table1

EXCEPT

SELECT col1,col2,col3 FROM table2

If I'm not mistaken this will give you all the rows in...

Maybe I'm way off base, however, stick to what you know...

What about using "except"? That's what I use to ensure that my results are matching, usually by putting the results...