I like NULL because it enables a limited, trinary condition.  Suppose the acceptable values for a column are TRUE or FALSE.  Enabling NULL for that column enables three conditions:  TRUE, FALSE,...

P.S. I've been writing code of one kind or another since 1965, and I missed the closing parenthesis in my post, above, truly by accident. Color might have...

And besides all that, upper case letters take more ink. Pretty soon your screen is bound to run out of it. Then where will you be?

Seriously, legibility is...

Jeff, Kevin, tmarkham et. al.,

Nice job! I'm truly impressed.

I'm a long time believer in the value of peer review. Just look at what came of this discussion.

Just for the record, I *LIKE* recursive code. I've written a lot of recursive code in various languages over the years, as well as reusable and reenterable code.

I do...

2000, 2005, and 2008.

Thank you Miika.

I think the choice of approach must depend upon the environment. For a shop whose TSQL writers...

You would still need one CASE statement for the ASC sort, and one for the DESC sort for a particular column.

You could use those same two CASE statements to sort...

There are FOUR spams, all worded the same.

1282864, 1282865, 1282866

1282868

I agree with Jack.

It happens that most of my applications are written in ColdFusion. Each language would be different but you can get the idea from the following ColdFusion...

Absolutely.

The following TSQL will produce two output sets.

If you put this TSQL into a stored procedure the application software you use should be able to select which output set you...

I would put your choices into a second table. This second table could be a temporary table or a table variable.

I agree that you should have provided the table...

You could use CASE statements in the proc because you were only using the IF statments to select the column. This might make it a little easier to maintain...

Thanks for your post, Andy. I think yours is a nice, clean approach too. You're right, I didn't need the zeroes when initializing the masks. The zeroes...

Thank you, Jeff. I appreciate it.