I was just reading up about possible collation issues using [Aa-Zz] etc, would it make much difference to performance to list them all?

CONSTRAINT CHK_TextCol CHECK (TextCol NOT LIKE '%[^abcedefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCEDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ]%')

This may work better

CONSTRAINT CHK_TextCol CHECK (TextCol NOT LIKE '%[^Aa-Zz]%')

This is only a basic example but you could use a CHECK constraint on the column to prevent non alpha types from being inserting into the table.

(Example Below does not...

You will have to adjust the pivot for any additional parts to the initial string

DECLARE @test-2 TABLE

(

RowID INT IDENTITY(1,1),

DelimitString VARCHAR(50)

PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (RowID)

)

INSERT INTO @test-2 (DelimitString)

SELECT 'karthik~gokul~siva~magesh~' UNION ALL

SELECT 'kar~go~sa~mag~'...

SELECT CONVERT(VARCHAR(10), GETDATE(), 120) AS DT

If you do a quick search you should be able to find a few sites with lists of the different date formats using CONVERT.

Have a...