Gary,

That's interesting....using a UDF that returns a table.  I guess you could then use the output of the table udf to input to scalar udfs. Or something like that?

Hmmm....seems like someone should...

Yeah, but your way may scale better, as my way causes cross joins with duplicates.   Would be interesting to test...

Ducati,

What you are trying to do is extremely complex and probably not possible without a thorough knowledge of excel's programming language.  Problems like nesting become pretty stinkin' complex pretty quick. ...

No, you can't use parameters within a view.  But you should have no problem using one or more functions in a view.  Your syntax looks odd, though:

SELECT     mail, sn, givenname

FROM        ...

Mike,

If that tables being used during replication it's probably heavily indexed.  re-building indexes is usually the killer during updates (but did you check the execution plan as suggested?).

If the update...

No need for a temp or derived table or a distinct count:

Update t2

set ORG = t1.ORG

from tbl t1

JOIN tbl t2 on t1.ContDir = t2.Contdir and t2.ORG is null

Yeah, there's a need for cursors...gulp. That was hard.  Honestly, though, I have yet to find a cursor I couldn't get rid of.  Granted, sometimes looping is necessary, but that's...

If you want speed, you should use nolock.  If you absolutely must have the most up to date data, don't use nolock.  The difference being that a Select without nolock...

How the heck are you supposed to administrate a database if you can't even see the data?  That makes no sense at all.  I wouldn't/couldn't work at a place like...

QUOTE:

I have a personal details table and a table that records an individuals transactions through a process. Each time a new record is added to show a new transaction I...

Wow, that's pretty stinkin' cool; using a bitwise operator with a patindex.  very nice; I'm impressed. Obviously I have a lot to learn about parsing strings.

cl

Technically, if you want to strip ONLY the trailing you'd have to do something like this (I can't figure out how to do this without a loop.

------------

declare @var varchar(30),

  @replace char(1)

select...

One year later....

Great article, I use to be a Configuration Manager/CodeMaster at Nordstroms web site.  I work elsewhere now; we're a small shop...

Yeah, words that throw syntax errors should usually not be object or column names.  Still, I do it sometimes anyway (a table named Database, for example).  Description and Name are...

SQLBill,

Why does Description show up blue in QA?  It's kinda misleading.