Staging table? Peter - do you know we can just do this?

--data

declare @doc varchar(8000)

set @doc = '

<root>

  <Customer>

   <Cust_id>101</Cust_id>

   <Cust_fname>"George"</Cust_fname>

   <Cust_lname>"Spencer"</Cust_lname>

   <Cust_address>"Some Address"</Cust_address>

  ...

I should've mentioned that, in general, it's better to do formatting at the front-end...

Of course, there are always exceptions.

Well, here's one way to do this in TSQL, but I'm sure it's irrelevant for Oracle

--data

declare @t table (x...

Nope.

If you describe what you want to do, there might be other options...

Table auditing using triggers? Take a look at these...

http://www.nigelrivett.net/SQLTriggers/Triggers_2_Creating_Audit_Trails.html

http://www.nigelrivett.net/SQLTriggers/AuditTrailTrigger.html

Thanks Peter - nice looking article.

I've not read the whole article yet (that's for when I have more time), but I wonder how your approach compares with the 'classic' crosstab/pivot...

Here's a set-based version of Ian's suggestion. It's not pretty, but I don't think anything you do will be pretty.

As with Ian's suggestion, I haven't removed 'IN SODIUM...

Hi hani

That's called relational division...

http://www.developersdex.com/gurus/articles/113.asp

--data

declare @user_companies table (user_id int, companies_name varchar(10))

insert @user_companies

          select 1, 'a'

union all select 1,...

And here's another way to do what you shouldn't...

--data

declare @t table (ID int, SVCS varchar(20))

insert @t

          select 1,...

DogBot - You can read about normalisation here...

http://www.datamodel.org/NormalizationRules.html

Peter - interesting approach

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but it looks like that might run into problems when there are lots of rows (because there's...

Ah, the great primary key debate. If you're interested, have a read of some articles/discussions (I believe there are one or two