In order to get the top records you must be using the following syntax.....

SELECT TOP n .......

FROM.......

ORDER BY [field]

In order to get the 'last' records simply reverse the ORDER...

You are quite right simon, you only need to join using the one field, providing that the alloc_num field is unique, which Avron has not confirmed.

So why doesn't this work.....

select allocdet.*

from (select min(alloc_num) as alloc_num, price_num, serv_prlv, agent_num from allocdet group by price_num, serv_prlv, agent_num) a

inner join allocdet on a.alloc_num = allocdet.alloc_num and a.price_num...

Once you have performed the SELECT DISTINCT price_num, serv_prlv, agent_num.... you have a subset of the original table.

If you then want to extract the information contained in the other fields...

See if this works.......

select allocdet.*

from (select min(alloc_num) alloc_num, price_num, serv_prlv, agent_num from allocdet group by price_num, serv_prlv, agent_num) a

inner join allocdet on a.alloc_num = allocdet.alloc_num...

I would recommend that you use the index and allow SQL to perform the SP without use of parallelism.

This will ensure that the other processor(s) are available for...

A fiber attached SAN is going to perform at comparable performance to any locally attached storage.

Most clustered solutions can only operate successfully by utilising SAN's, since the storage has to...

I would suggest that BAD practise is to have no fault tolerance. Once you have fault tolerance in your system any further improvements you can make are normally a...

As a general rule of thumb (before getting too complex).....

The more performance you want - The more spindles (physical drives) you need!

Also, with only a single drive, you have NO...

Simon, can you please clarify where table variables are stored if not in memory (like any other variable).

I have run traces while using table variables and no write operations are...

You normally have to specify the user name (e.g. dbo) when calling a UDF.

Have you tried......

SELECT * FROM TSTCMDDB1..dbo.usysprocess(51)

....only a guess!

Since the trigger is obviously built on a specific table in your database you may like to consider adding a bit column to your table to indicate whether to fire...

I think you should be able to do this with dynamic sql.

declare @s1 as char(6)

declare @sql as varchar(8000)

set @s1 = '11_2002'

set @sql = 'CREATE TABLE ' + @s1 +

'...

I think this should work, even if it isnt the most elegent solution = you just have to ignore the sequence column in the results.

select grade,

case ascii(right(grade, 1))

when 43...

I can't say that I fully understand the specifics of the errors you are receiving but as a work around have you tried using a table variable.

In many cases table...