And, thanks for the feedback!

First, please take a look at the following to see how to get better answers quicker...

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Best+Practices/61537/

With that in mind, here's the test tables and data I used... (scroll bars are...

Please don't double post... we'll get to you...

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic433241-338-1.aspx

Lookup "Cross-tab" and "Pivot" in Books Online... both methods have their uses for this.

I think David recommends his method because SELECT/INTO will temporarily lock SysObjects while the data is transferring...

However, I prefer the SELECT/INTO method for two reasons...

1. If you CAN...

C'mon folks... WinZip Pro costs what, 60$??? Don't screw around with your archive data... do it right. You probably spend more than $60 a month buying coffee, softdrinks, and/or...

Oh, yeah... almost forgot... if you're going to do something to "lakhs of records", then forgot about the table variables... they do...

I just got 2k5 so I haven't done any performance testing (yet) to compare the two... and, I'll probably get all sorts of flack for this... but based on the...

Replace the 1234567890 with your INT column or formula. Could turn this into a function. Note that it's generally a bad idea to do this type of formatting...

Oh, crud... you're right... I just loaded 2k5 over the weekend and verified what you say to be true... it's not in 2k5... reportedly it was and I took someone's...

It will be a valuable experience... perhaps not the way most think, but valuable nevertheless.

And then, anyone who is touting the label of "Senior Software Engineer" needs to be able to do some pretty complex stuff right off the top of your head (like...

It's far better to write good fast SQL with the proper indexes instead of trying to trick...

Heh... they even made the same mistake that caused the y2k crisis...

Best T-Shirt I ever saw on the subject of "SQL Darwin Awards" was...

[font="Courier New"] SELECT *

...

[font="Courier New"]SET @Cmd = 'DEL \\dt-sc2\shares\Data.txt'

EXEC Master.dbo.xp_CmdShell @Cmd[/font]