You could try to create a staging area, and use TEXT as column data type. Then import to this table. Performance will decrease while importing.

It is then fairly easy to...

You mean like telling people to force their boss to solve their problems?

That must be a masterpiece of helpful information. Don't you agree?

It seems to me that you are not...

Unless it is a legacy system, and orignal poster wants to create reports in Reporting Services or other reporting applications.

The column is VARCHAR for us unknown reasons.

Sergiy, what about you actually...

It is called a derived table. The table aliased do all the work, the outer select only formats it.

SELECT Col1

FROM Table1

ORDER BY CAST(Col1 AS DATETIME) DESC

SELECT REPLACE(STR(25, 11, 0), ' ', '0')

Use the new SQL Server 2005 features!

SELECT

Privilege,

TargetID,

Permission,

Strength

FROM (

SELECT Privilege

They are both right. It is just an opinion for a point of origin.

You can explain the world and universe having the Earth in centre. The formulas are hideous but it can be...

select

item.name,

vendor

.name,

sum(case when