I agree 100% with your assessment. I studied nightly using the official MS course books for the 70-431. I have been using SQL Server regularly since 2003. I felt very...

Thank you for the posts. I'll give it a whirl this afternoon. It high time I get started with triggers.

Would something like the post above work in a trigger?

This is actually an export from the UPS WorldShip software. It exports data directly to one of my tables using an ODBC connection. I tried a computed column using CONVERT(datetime,SUBSTRING(CollectionDate,1,8))...

This is true, max indicates that the maximum storage size is 2^31-1 bytes. You should have no trouble passing very large strings of data.

To elaborate further, if you are looking to get the current date in a specified format use:

SELECT CONVERT(CHAR,GETDATE(),x) AS CurrentDate

where x equals a style value. See the list of...

This has been a great experience. It's nice to converse with other developers/DBA's for a change. I have been the sole IT guy for a small business for 7 years...

Sweet. Works like a charm. I also like how you've added number of days as a parameter. I can add days as a selection on our tracking site and pass...

Very nice. I'll start playing with the solution and see what I get. Thank you for taking the time to work on this.

RE: WITH TIES. This produces the same result I received before placing the DISTINCT keyword in the TOP query. I apologize if I didn't explain clearly what I am trying...

For anyone viewing this post, I finally have a solution. It may not be the best solution but it works for now. If anyone can see a way to simplify...

I have to throw a little kink in the issue. It appears that TOP n when evaluating datetime fields always uses the time portion in addition to the date. Above...

Thank you for the reply. Both options above still only return one record for each createdate. I do like your approach though keeping it simple. Any thoughts on why only...

I think I have this figured out. It looks like the time portion of the createdate field was getting in the way. I will do more testing but here is...

Internally we have an order id but this is information exported from a UPS system. I did try the order by and it didn't help. I think I'm close with...