Hmmm... Reread Steve's posts where he hints a little, but I realize that we actually don't know exactly what kind of problem he's having... (at least I've missed it)

So, Steve....

A quick search on Google also turns up a bunch of links...

Though, in this case it seems like it doesn't fall into the 'dba/admin/maint' category, but in the 'user-code' category....

For stuff that falls into the 'admin/dba/maint' domain, then dynamic SQL, loops, cursors et al are imo 'fair game'. Usually such code is of a nature that requires loops etc.

For...

Perhaps this need a little clarification?

It rides on the fact that @DateString contains a...

Well, I do think that the differences you're experiencing has been explained.

What you want: You want a SQL DML statement to process in a predictable order.

Herein lies the contradiction. There...

If you are inputting your dates from a front end through ADO then you can and should pass dates as dates. If you must use strings then I always...

I'm sorry if I was unclear.

I don't mean 'whatever the input is' as in 'allow freetext queries', more in the form of 'whatever different combination of arguments/paramters the user chooses...

I don't think that is the kind of 'order' we're looking for.

FORCEORDER is when you want to tell the optimizer to join in the order tables are mentioned in the...

Ok.

But then the case is that we're exploiting a physical implementation (that is, we think we know how our data is stored on the indexpages) and we cross our...

Seems like you've hit a bottleneck (or several)

What does the delete do? sleep or run? Is it waiting most of the time?

What is it waiting for? What is the CPU...

We never input dates in the way that SQL Server stores them in a datetime.

'20071003' is just as much a 'date' as '2007-10-03'

But only the first format is independant...

Give some example of what your data looks like, and on that data, how you wish to apply the 'distinct'..

That is, indata, and expected output from that data.

/Kenneth

Well, 'set username' in a prompt returns the contents of USERNAME on the ws it's executed.

Problem is how to find that ws? And what about security? And then we have...

I'm not sure I'm getting what the real problem is, but... it seems to be about ordering...?

That is, the problem is that a given order is expected, and that order...