It's never good to store a date as a VARCHAR... if you want VARCHAR, you would do that in a SELECT... not as a matter of storage.

Hey SoulTower! Wondered when you'd get a login... especially after the apparent demise of Belution.

Kenneth Wilhelmsson (10/29/2007)

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Oh really?

Then I assume that what was 'desired' was something else than what was written?

You're actually saying that the below example is 'incorrect', or 'undesired', or simply plain...

Gail... nice explanation! Short, sweet, and to the point.

Sandy... think of a CTE the same as you would any "inline view" or "derived table" except that they are cited...

It's not likely that a log file would have the extension ".txt"...

Now, that's what I'm talking about... 43 minutues vs 3... both have the correct answers... which one do you want running on your machine? 😉

Man, you talk a lot about nothing...

First two sorts are incorrect because they did not sort in the desired order.

Do you have a specific question or do you just want us to do all of your homework for you?

You're in class to learn this stuff and these...

Check for triggers, as well.

C'mon man... do your own homework... you haven't even tried...

Heh... ok... guess I'll get up on the soap box, then...

ALWAYS use the fastest, most effecient code possible... ALWAYS use comments to explain the code unless it's just too, too...

Jason certainly had the right idea... and this goes just a bit further for forcing a format... but it's not 100% bullet proof...

DECLARE @test-2 TABLE (SomeDate VARCHAR(20))

INSERT INTO...

I agree with Jason... I think ISDATE, by itself, is a very bad way to check for valid dates. For example, the following all return "1" using ISDATE...

[font="Courier New"]SELECT...

Any import will fail if someone has the sheet open... in my opinion, best way to do this is to make a macro on the spreadsheet to export the correct...

David,

"Dropping the time" should be done on the display side of things... not on the import side of things. Reason being is that the only way you can truly...