Cheers buddy

I'm changing the date to chars to avoid the problem of 1/jan/2010 at 1pm being different from 1/jan/2010 at 3pm etc.

My brain is too muddled by now to analyse your suggested change - will it acheive the same result and what is the performance implication? better or worse?

Any suggestions on how to identify which column is currently in Latin1_General_CI... collation?

also what syntax would I need to use to change the collation at column level?

Cheers!