I suggested you should rewrite your stored procedure that returns the surrogate key to you, as a function instead. So I called the function fnGetNextSurrogateKey instead.

Post the code...

This will potentially lead to wrong results. What when Application + UserID is 'App131'?

Is that Application 13 and User 1, or Application 1 and User 31?

I reformated your code to be easier to understand, and this is what I got

SELECT  [Start Date],

        SUM(Volume),

        CASE

        WHEN Application = 'APP1' THEN

           CASE UserID

      ...

There are a number of errors with your logic above, I don't know where to start. I really believe you can do without cursor. Use code something like my suggestion...

Turn to dynamic SQL.

DECLARE @sysid int,

        @sysname varchar(50),

        @idxname varchar(50),

        @sql varchar(500)

DECLARE mycursor CURSOR STATIC

GLOBAL SCROLL

FOR

SELECT so.id, so.name, si.name

FROM sysobjects AS so

INNER JOIN sysindexes AS si ON...

The Quick'n'Dirty solution, which is not recommended due to the possibility of SQL injection, is to build your string with VbScript such as

sSQL = "MyStoredProcedure '" & FirstParameter & "',...

It returns <NULL> value for every ISDATE() = 0. So for all values that can't be interpreted as date [ISDATE() = 1], the

What will happen when query is longer than 8,000 characters?

Do you have some field to distinguish between blocks of persons? Or this is only for one person always?

And please do not sub-threading other people's post. Start your own thread.

Beware of the 8,000 character limit for VARCHAR variables.

I wrote an article about pivoting a few weeks back. Please read it at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/columnists/plarsson/pivottableformicrosoftsqlserver.asp

Are you trying to export to Excel or Text file? If Excel, [Sheet1$] must be replaced with a sheet name in your Excel file. If Text, the file...

Try both solutions and check the query plan. I don't think there should be a difference. However the granularity of each column could be of importance, but I think the...

OPENROWSET does.

This is an example of how to output to Excel. I don't think it will be too hard to rewrite for text files.

INSERT INTO OPENROWSET('Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0', 'Excel 8.0;Database=C:\Test.xls',...

Faster too, I presume.

Since the function ISDATE already have checked that the field is a valid date, there is no need to cast the field one more time before...

Let us continue to use the ISDATE function as follows for generic solution

INSERT  Slimmed_down_admissions

        (

            PrimDiag,

            Spec,

            Age,

            Sex,

            OutputArea,

            DischargeDate,

            EpiStartDate,

           ...