Craig,

You mean you fixed your problem?  Would you mind posting the solution?  This is a forum, after all

Just curious... why names like "SP20" ... not exactly "self documenting"...

Wow, Michael... not sure what happened there.  I've seen that before (post gobbling others) but not when I've posted.  Didn't even show what I posted.  Matt might be right... might...

Something like this will work...

ALTER FUNCTION [dbo].[GetSpecialsInCase]
(
@TCaseId varchar(25)
)
RETURNS VARCHAR(2000)
AS
BEGIN
DECLARE @itemList VARCHAR(8000)
SELECT @itemList = IsNull(@itemlist + ', ' + char(13), space (0)) + d.SpecialsDesc
FROM
(--=== Derived table "d" finds correct distinct SpecialsDesc
SELECT...

I know... preaching to the choir but I have to say it... Putting a better server on the dev side may not help that problem...

Hey there, Jules... long time no see.

I think these folks are all steering you in the right direction... One instance and multiple databases would be my inclination, as well, for...

Heh... like anything else, it only sucks when you don't know how

As suggested a couple of times... First SUM the minutes and THEN convert the result for display using one of the many methods shown.... you cannot aggregate non-numeric data with...

Yes... easily done... but you need to learn what ">>" means from the CMD prompt (or xp_CmdShell).  Lookup "Using command redirection operators" in Windows help (under the Windows [Start] button...)

Nicely done (as usual), Michael.  Simple, straight forward, nasty fast...

Heh... I understand what the rules are trying to say and (actually) very much agree with them, but I'm thinking that those definitions could be seriously misconstrued by those trying...

Chris has the right idea with the Numbers table... except he didn't carry it far enough... we can do the whole table without a loop.

First, as Chris had in his...

Setting a database's Auto_Shrink property to ON is probably not the best idea in the world.  Something made it grow, you did something to reduce it's size, it's gonna grow...

By the way, if the definition of "set based" is...

- it opens the recordset (table in this case) once;

- it accesses each value in the recordset once;

- for any row...

Heh... hell no   According to some of the people I work with, you need to rebuild the power company