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bfuchsFlag for United States of America

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What is the recommended way to perform an automated daily SQL update query?

Hi Experts,

I need to perform a SQL update query in a daily bases (something like 'update MyTable set MyField = False where..'), wondering what is the best way recommended for performing such a task?
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Ryan Chong
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Ryan has given you the answer you asked for but the fact that you need to do this indicates that your schema is not normalized.  You might want to consider calculating the true/false in a query or view so it is always up to date.
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ASKER

@Pat,
This is a case where the 90% is being governed by rules (false), however users want reserve the right to overwrite rules, and this is why I need to store them in DB.
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Thank you.
Storing an override does not necessitate running a bulk update.  For example, in an Order Entry application, the default price is stored in the product record.  Then when you add a product to an order creating a row in the Order Details table, you copy the unit price from the product record and place it in the order details record.  Then the user can change it if necessary.  Whenever you look at the order, you see the price charged for an item rather than the suggested price.  But you do NOT store the sum of all the order details price * quantity calculations in the Order header table since that violates normaliztion rules whereas copying the suggested price does not and the reason is that the suggested price is the price at a point in time rather than the current price and may in fact be different from any standard price charged in history.

What you are doing sounds something like storing someone's age.   You would have to recalculate the age every day otherwise some part of the population will have an incorrect age in years.  This is absolutely wrong and would never be done except perhaps in a data warehouse application where you only updated the data weekly or monthly and even then storing age is questionable unless you always want the age as of the date the warehouse was last updated.

Anyway, you have your answer so that is all I have to say.
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ASKER

Hi,

To be specific, this is an Employees table and users wants to see if all info including health docs are up to date.

Now I was only given certain rules when it shows employees are definitely not up to date, while the rules when considered up to date are too complicated to be programmed (word of users..) and they want decide and do it manually.

So in other words, employees are only considered up to date when they manually approve them, however after approval if some documents are expired for example they want the approval to be cancelled.

PS, Appreciate your input.

Thanks,
Ben
Sometimes you just have to go with the flow.