I agree with MarkusB. I chose nchar(1). There's nothing in the question to suggest that this single character of data will be limited to single-byte chars. You set yourself up...

Yes. Actually, it was such a simple answer, I feel very foolish admitting to it. Instead of changing the properties of the text box of the heading so that it...

I've tried various attempts at "if then" or "IIF" clauses but the ODBC driver doesn't seem to like any of them. Unfortunately, it's a bit like stumbling around in the...

Unfortunately, I can't create remote stored procedures and the brand of SQL that the ODBC driver supports doesn't recognise CASE statements 🙁

Thanks for more time on this, Adam. I think the reason your method is getting the wrong answer is that you are choosing the larger value of the summed actual...

It's a proprietal database orginally built by a company called Kerridge, now owned by a company called ADP. They wrote the ODBC driver to allow very basic queries to be...

It's an ODBC link to an ISAM database using a 3rd party driver.

OK here are some scripts that create tables similar to those I am using:

CREATE TABLE OptionTypes (OptionType char(1), Description nvarchar(50), RecoverableNRC char(1))

INSERT INTO OptionTypes VALUES('B', 'Bonus schemes', 'N')

INSERT INTO...

Thanks Adam and Chris for your replies. Both look very helpful and I have been trying to get them to work. I especially like the CASE statements suggested by Chris....

Thanks Christopher. I can see that after a long time, this statushistory table might produce a large and ever increasing number of rows for a particular order. OK so with...

Are you saying that TOP will only return data based on the order in which it is stored on the disk and *not* based on the order in my ORDER...

Hi Chris

Can you explain? (sorry: newbie)

Oops! Newbie error! Changing the SET @sql bit to the following fixed this:

SET @sql = 'SELECT @deldate = TransactionDate FROM OPENQUERY('...

Thanks, Andras. Using temporary table seems to work OK.

John, thanks for your reply. I've simplified the query significantly to focus on the part that's causing the error. Both the linked server and the main table (the vs alias)...