Actually the code is -- select distinct * into table_remove_dups from table_A

so I have several fields and want to make sure all are unique with out duplicate values but one of my fields is a text field. Other than your suggestion to recast the data type (which is simular to me simply changing the datatype which I will do if there is no other way to do it) is there another way to check for the distinctness of this field with the others together? I don't really want to change the data type because I have chosen this data type as I believe that it is the largest character/string data type available to me and this field may become quite large.