Thanks Jeff, (and others) for taking your time to try to help me.

I am out of town for a few days and wont be able to try that test...

Yes Lynn, that is what I am wanting to end up with.

I have made this work with some pattern matching queries in a while loop. Again, not very elegant but...

Wow. Thanks for pointing out everything wrong with my database, when you have absolutely no knowledge of what it is or how it works. And you got all that...

Sure:

create table #temp1 (pkID int identity, dms_id varchar(40))

insert into #temp1 values ('1')

insert into #temp1 values ('1/12/14')

insert into #temp1 values ('18/24')

insert into #temp1 values ('14/18/24')

insert into #temp1 values ('17')

result set should...

Thank you. this does work, but on a table with 14K rows (and growing) it's too slow for our needs (about 6 seconds). This needs to be something that...