So... if there are, say, 7 dates that are all where the startdate of the next row is 1 greater than the enddate of the previous row like this...

1;AA;20070921;20070922;10

1;AA;20070922;20070923;20

1;AA;20070923;20070924;30

1;AA;20070924;20070925;40

1;AA;20070925;20070926;50

1;AA;20070926;20070927;60

1;AA;20070927;20070928;70

... would the...

The problem with selecting either the MAX or the TOP 1 DESC, even in the presence of the read locks that Andy included in the code, is that you only...

Ok, Cees... I was just making sure that you had everything that you needed.  And Lowell's snippet above will take care of the zeros...

Wow... let's triple the work the server does... some vendors just don't get it...

Thanks for the feedback, Jim...

Heh... I've gotta agree with that part... we've gotten more done on cocktail napkins that we have at such seminars.

Beer... the greatest "networking" tool there is

Just don't forget the "-s" (column separator) flag... might want to set it to -s"" so there is no separator...

And, yes, you could use BCP for a fixed file format......

... or....

You could import whole lines into a very wide column and split them there using a split function...

... or ...

You could do the same but a bit different... import...

You bet, folks... thanks for the feedback.

Heh... no, Greg... not about good "lurkers" like you ... it's about some folks who will never "get it".

Thanks John and Rog... much appreciated!

You may be using the wrong layer to do database things in.  The type of activety that you've both described should probably be done in...

Because the "pipe" character is not one of those "special" characters... \t doesn't mean "use [t] as the delimiter", for example... it means "use a tab as the delimiter".  the [|]...

Ok... thanks!  I'll put my soapbox away

I'm pretty sure that OpenRowSet wants constants, not caclulations, as it's operands.  You'll probably need to shift the whole thing to dynamic SQL.

Guess we'll need to see the rest... no errors there except can't see where the starting and ending quotes are at the beginning and end of your snippet.

Thanks...