Here's an article on this subject...

http://sqlteam.com/item.asp?ItemID=3331

Google is your friend:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=create+insert+statements

Returns a whole heap of good stuff on the first page, including:

http://www.databasejournal.com/scripts/article.php/1502051

http://vyaskn.tripod.com/code/generate_inserts.txt

http://www.codeproject.com/database/InsertGeneratorPack.asp

Glad to help - thanks for the feedback. It's often the easy things which stump us...

I've just read what Vasc has written, and I agree with that approach. I just wanted some answers first

A further question is why...

Some questions...

1. Does this proc compile?

2. You have a ROLLBACK TRANSACTION but no begin or commit tran? Can you explain?

3. You are trying to create a table in your sproc?...

I'm confused. Have you tried this?

dbo.function(param)

But Shabu doesn't want to format data?

He wants to change the datatype of an existing varchar column to datetime.

He's got issues with doing that...

Okay - that sounds like there's some data in there which is not valid datetime data.

Try running...

select dateofbirth from mytable where isdate(dateofbirth) = 0

If there are some...

This works fine for me (the bit in purple is the bit you need)...

--data

set nocount on

create table #t1 (dateofbirth  varchar(30))

insert #t1

          select '1 jan 2000'

union all...

Or...

--data

declare @t table (seq int, area int, page int)

insert @t

          select 1, 300, 0

union all select 1, 200, 0

union all select 1, 100, 0

union all select...

No. That's not possible. You can only update one table at a time unless that table has triggers which update other tables.

I suspect you just need to do this...

Ryan Randall

Solutions are easy. Understanding the problem, now, that's the hard part.