Stored procedures give you :

Performance

Maintainability (You are only passing parameters - not trying to work out how a lengthy command was constructed)

Modularity (the n-tier thing)

Security - you can restrict access...

Also not analysed it in detail but what jumps at me is that you are using a cursor.  Cursors are slow slow slow !!!  You should be able to use...

Happy Birthday Kendall !!

I doubt that there are many IT projects of any size that can be deemed a complete success in all respects.  There is always something that could have been done...

Any software development project - any project in fact - is a team process.  The whole team owns it and the whole team succeeds or fails together.  If there is...

Dates is dates !!!  Chars are for display only.  Trying to process dates as strings is asking for trouble (because of the formatting issues David mentioned) and inefficient.  SQL Server...

I would always put readability and maintainability first - any rules are a means to an end, not the end in themselves.  As a general principle though, avoid reserved words!

Hope you did it but, if not, you must uninstall all CTP components before installing SQL Express.

Thank you, Hugo - an excellent explanation.  I usually just update fields that I have changed and check those but the single field test is, as you say, more efficient.

What I never have understood is ... what on earth practical USE is it?

I would dispute the 'correct' answer specified.  MSDN says 'Every time that a row with a timestamp column is modified or inserted, the incremented database timestamp value is inserted in...

Thanks for that.  Some of the affected files are different versions.  The trick now is to find the correct ones for an unsupported OS !

Use a GROUP BY instead of distinct.  Then you can avoid duplicates with something like :

SELECT ID, [Name], MIN(SequenceField) FROM dbo.MyTable GROUP BY ID, [Name]

... but, as everyone says, you MUST...

.. and I'm thinking you're right Jeff !  I didn't mean to imply anything otherwise.

As long as EmpID is unique (presumably it is) and that is the selection order required...

Remember that SQLServer does not guarantee any physical row order - the execution plan may change as data changes and lead to a different order in the result set unless...