Mal D!

Glad to see your posts... thought I was the only wirehead with the idea of "Yes, perhaps its time to re-evaluate", but in the direction of maybe it's worth...

Thank you...

Thanks for the feedback, Rom.

Thanks.  It would be nice if you shared your solution with us... both the function and the cursor, please.

First and foremost, Serqiy is correct... delimited data should not be allowed to be stored in the database.  The inserts to the database should be done via a staging table,...

That's why you shouldn't format in the backend...

Okidoki

Boy, I'll say... dunno why I made the dupe check separate... must've been that old donut I ate this morning 

Wonder why Seric thought that technique required knowing what the words are?

It's ok... that's why all the smiley faces...    you're doing the right thing... when you have a front end involved, let it do...

Heh... the reason why you didn't find it in Books Online is because formatting dates for a GUI in SQL is a really bad idea for about a thousand reasons,...

Ok... let's say that's correct for a minute... what does something like the following cost in the short term?  Nothing... schedule met... everyone was happy...

 What's it costing them now?  Somebody was...

Well kinda...

Change the FK's to "CASCADE ON DELETE" and then you only need to delete from one table

Lookup "cascading referential integrity constraints" in...

P.S.  If you do decide to go the temp table route as I suggested, then adding the appropriate indexes and a primary key on the temp table may help speed things...

Rom Beng,

Something like this should do it for you... read the embedded comments for an explanation, please... I did not use your given table structures... this is all based on...