That does it!  I'm moving to Arizona...

I don't have your data so not sure what else is going on... the following returns 1.3 as expected... (SQL Server Developer Edition and Enterprise Edition, sp4)

DECLARE @test-2 DECIMAL(18,4)

SET @test-2...

Because, first, you must have an envelope   Lot's of folks just aren't gonna make it to 2005 because of budget and manpower. ...

Heh... that coming from a person that lives on an island

Yes... it does work... if you actually know something about SQL    And, the responses normally go directly to the person providing the opportunity...

Ok... so did that do the trick for you or what?  A little feedback goes a long way around here...

The problem is the code highlighted in red... remove it and it will work fine.

UPDATE clean

SET clean.branchid = branches.branchid

FROM clean

INNER JOIN branches

ON clean.ppi = branches.ppi

Although the following works fine...

 SELECT CAST(LEFT(@TestXMLTime,22) AS DATETIME) works just fine...

Hey Remi!  My car won't start... can you tell me what's wrong with it?...

   Waddaya mean you want to pop the hood?

Hard to tell with the criteria for the "ON" clauses missing...

Yep... temp tables and all that other stuff work fine on tiny tables containing 2000 or even 10000 rows... try it with a million rows...

This, of course, can be done more easily...

HOW does it save time?

You bet.  Thank you for the feedback.

It may be a bug in TOP that someone recently reported for SS 2k5.  Stupid little things like...

SELECT TOP (75) PERCENT *

FROM sometable

Yield the incorrect results... but not all the...

Here's a fully functional example, using the Northwind database, of how you could do it in SQL Server... most folks turn it into a function....

    USE NorthWind

DECLARE @RegionToFind VARCHAR(20)

   ...