I really like this question since I use a lot of XML for bulk inserts of business objects.

And thank you to Paul and everyone, I just learned that Cross Apply...

Thanks for the question

Always a good reminder now and then.

Good thing MSDN is not blacked out.

Nice and easy.... and useful.

Good question.

I have learned this one from experience :blush:

also I don't believe the text() is needed as described in the answer 'name[1]' should work.

First Page 😀

I put to much though into that one at first because I though it was going to be a collate issue with the INT vs int.

In the end, nice and...

declare @date datetime

Set @date = '2011-07-31 00:00:00.000'

IF (@date BETWEEN '2011-07-01' and '2011-07-31')

PRINT 'Yes'

ELSE

PRINT 'No'

does return Yes

I knew this one from experience :blush:

But 4 minutes does not justify going vertical over horizontal 🙂

I tried to create a cross tab using the normal Cross Tab method for 10k rows, the query took over 4 minutes. No where near the hundreds of milliseconds...

Yeah... one point... now two with this post.

I wasn't sure about 3, but I chose it because #4 is wrong

from MSN

LineString can only be

"Accepted LineString instances can be input into a geometry variable"

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb895372.aspx

While...

charlietuna (10/23/2011)

---

The solution seems a bit opaque. Something like this is (to me) much more straightforward for the next person who has to read it:

update #t

set col1 = case col1...

Nice easy question, especially because I did not have to answer it today 🙂

Bob-683340 (10/13/2011)

---

So which is really better - the very clever one-liner whose logic can't be unravelled without some head scratching, or the somewhat longer version that's simple enough to be...