You may want to reconsider, Bill... or not "It Depends" ...

 CREATE FUNCTION dbo.fnDateOnly

/***********************************************************

 Purpose:

 This function...

Nicely done, Peter... not sure where my post went (must've done the timeout thing ), but I was going to say that your...

How do you define "First and Last record"?  If not by date (Dates are not in any particular order according to you), then by...

I'm thinking that SQL Server 2k8 kicks some serious butt!

Dang, Peter... you must be working on a really nice box... my poor ol' 1.8Ghz home computer SQL 2k Developer's Edition just didn't do that well... and your's does much better...

A bit confused by your original post... what do the two tables contain?  One table for FirstNames and one table for LastNames?  Or one table for Male and another for...

I think these were part of the exercises... haven't tested all the methods for which way they round mostly because some aren't worth the effort... the following code is a...

There's actually 2 nearly identical threads for the same thing by the same participants... I'm truly amazed... not in a good way, either.

Thought about that, Ronald... that, I believe, would allow the Operators to run xp_CmdShell anytime they wanted and that's not a good thing... 'course, I could be wrong especially since I'm...

Outstanding Ram!  Welcome to the U.S.A!

Thanks, Steve,

The thing that really kills me is the cruddy data that poor ol' Jerry (the OP) has received.  The data can be imported and correctly parsed even making some...

Great idea... thanks everyone...

Carl, thanks for the original idea that everyone seems to be hitting on.

Rog,

I appreciate the compliment.  A long time ago, I realized that the first step towards the "Sql excellence" you speak of is correct identification of the given problem...

Apparently, though,...

You mean just use a scheduled job?  Or is there some way to allow the user to start the job "indirectly"?

The one David was talking about is actually available in "Help" in Query Analyzer... it's also known as "Books OnLine".