Yes, and it's a little annoying to keep hearing "if you'd designed your clustering key for this problem, it wouldn't be a problem." 🙂

You only get one clustering...

Withdrawn, sorry about that.

Jeff, how am I going to know if it's a false positive or not, without doing...

That's a big IF, Sergiy. ...

Are you storing your begin_dates and end_dates as char or varchar columns?

I ask because at some point your example data apparently switches from DD/MM/YYYY format to MM/DD/YYYY....

The last time I hired someone, he was literally the weakest candidate - on paper. But then, several people weeded themselves out in phone interviews, and one local person...

When you join two tables, the optimizer should know which one is the smaller. It doesn't have to follow the sequence in which the tables were listed in...

I have not. My widest table is "only" 138 columns wide and I'm pretty ticked off at that especially considering the all the bloody columns that have 0 or very...

A note about WHILE loops versus cursors. If you are using a WHILE loop with some sort of logic to increment the next row to be read, then...

You've been asking questions here long enough to know we need some sample data and expected output.

Post some up and we'll fix your problem for you.

I'll admit the loop is going to run a long time, but you don't have to worry about missing a constraint, nonclustered index, foreign key, etc. On the...

Jeff, wouldn't you have to stop activity on the ORIGINAL copy of the table to bring it current with transactions that occur not only during the initial copy but also...

You might want to have a backup copy of that table before you do such drastic surgery, but if you're sure you want to get rid of 80% of it.......

Glad you figured it out! 😀 Here's another way.

Even though you can insert data into a table using the output from the EXEC(@SQL), you might also...

"Whey" is the second hint. Have a great weekend 😀