• I'm as big an advocate of DelimitedSplit8K in the SQLverse as you're gonna find, but in this case I'd say there's a simpler way:

    ;WITH SampleData (ID,PartNumber)

    AS

    (

    SELECT 1,'BR643-0034-344-34' UNION ALL

    SELECT 2,'AS54-54689' UNION ALL

    SELECT 3,'A77360-3454-34456-4' UNION ALL

    SELECT 4,'B7374-343-33-32-356-433-11-1' UNION ALL

    SELECT 5,'B7374'

    )

    SELECT ID, LEFT(PartNumber, LEN(PartNumber)-CHARINDEX('-', REVERSE(PartNumber)))

    FROM SampleData

    It even handles cases where there is no hyphen at all in the part number.

    Note that I don't mean to imply that Steven's solution doesn't handle this case.


    My mantra: No loops! No CURSORs! No RBAR! Hoo-uh![/I]

    My thought question: Have you ever been told that your query runs too fast?

    My advice:
    INDEXing a poor-performing query is like putting sugar on cat food. Yeah, it probably tastes better but are you sure you want to eat it?
    The path of least resistance can be a slippery slope. Take care that fixing your fixes of fixes doesn't snowball and end up costing you more than fixing the root cause would have in the first place.

    Need to UNPIVOT? Why not CROSS APPLY VALUES instead?[/url]
    Since random numbers are too important to be left to chance, let's generate some![/url]
    Learn to understand recursive CTEs by example.[/url]
    [url url=http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/St