OK, here is another solution that I believe is stripped down to the basics:

INSERT INTO [#gpa]

VALUES (1,'math',3),

(1,'eng',4),

...

Try the following, the concept is:

1. do a cross join of all courses and terms

2. left join the results of the cross join to the marks...

I am surprised that nobody has mentioned the obvious next requirement which is an accessible and searchable repository where people can research and find previously performed proofs to allow people...

I believe this will handle your first case:

SELECT [col1ID]

, CAST(CASE WHEN MIN([Col2ID]) = MAX([Col2ID]) THEN 1 ELSE 0 END AS BIT) AS [Bit]

FROM...

For the set-based, tally table, CTE freaks among us, here is a set-based solution that uses a tally table and CTEs:

SET NOCOUNT ON;

-- The @Strings table variable represents whatever...

Dwain,

I liked your analysis of the different options for building a resultset that included both an in-effect and an out-of-effect date, BUT I think you missed the boat on the...

Things to keep in mind:

- the BETWEEN operator is the logical equivalent of ">= and <=".

- the DATETIME datatype has...

Apologies for not being clear... I've been in a real crunch for the last week or so.

What I meant was just exactly what you said. You write the data...

Part of the reason why Paul S. might be seeing some instability is because he didn't trust the @Bitbucket variable and took to writing to disk. Depending...

dwain.c (9/10/2013)

---

Paul - I get fairly stable results with this test harness. Can you confirm?

I am also running on a SQL Server that is fairly quiescent (no other processes...

OK, this one really sucked me in for more than I planned on doing!

I was surprised by the variability in the results and thought that there had to be something...

Interestingly, by using a variable instead of 1000000 it was faster, but using a variable instead of 1000 makes it slower!

Here is the script I used for testing followed by...

Here is another variation on the math method that my testing says is a little faster:

DECLARE @Billion INT;

SET @Billion = 1000000000;

SET STATISTICS TIME ON;

SELECT @Bitbucket...