Sorry for the slow reply, I don't surf on the weekends!

If you want to count how many transactions where are that contain both Product A and B, I'd try

select count(...

I think JeffB hit the problem, but also remember that a datetime data type stores the data one way but will display it depending on the users regional settings.  So...

In your table design, make both columns nullable.  Then add an INSERT/UPDATE trigger to check that if inserted.ColA = 'xx' and inserted.ColB is NULL then rollback else happy days!

OOPs my BOLD and Italics got lost !! ugggh

See if my above post makes sense anyway.

I'm not 100% sure what you are asking here, but I don't like your summary table idea at the bottom.  Merging the rows, by transaction will be much harder to...

If you are thinking about making columns of datatype char or varchar(8000), but need more space than the 8000 width table restriction, try using a text or ntext datatype.  Text...

Thanks PW,

That will work fine.  I didn't think about the OR and checking for NULL on both tables.  Of course it looks simple now that I see it.  Also,...

True, I could have an ORDER Insert Trigger that creates a dummy ORDER LINE, but as you say, I wouldn't know what data to insert in the other columns.

I don't...