Heh... yeah, I knew what you meant... I was just teasin' for a minute 'cause I woke up this morning feeling great.   Sorry,...

Everyday should be a good day to die

There are no good days to die... it's over...

Yep... you're either correct on needing 4 or you'd need to turn off the auto-daylight savings time.  And the auto-synch you mentioned would certainly be the way to go.  Cost's...

On second thought, Ganesh, I see where you say "The requirement for generating this numbers is not to be used for any database operations"... why even go near the database for...

On older MS systems, why spend so much money?  Write a batch file and schedule it with Task Scheduler...

What I see is that you shouldn't worry about having each letter prefix start with 1.  There should be an IDENTITY column and a prefix column.  Concatenate the two when...

Remi...

Just sharing info...

57 Minutes on my 1.8 Ghz, 2GB pc at home running Developer's Edition of 2000 at sp3a.

Ganesh,

There's only a couple of reasons why I could ever see for generating the numbers from 1 to a billion... and none of them are good.  For example... lot's of...

Sw...

I'd like to recommend that you look up "Temporary Tables" in Books Online as well as making a visit to the following web-site...

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;305977&Product=sql2k

Between the two, you should have just...

Not sure why you don't write a trigger to store the data in a staging table along with the date the trigger fired and the operation that took place... then,...

You don't need to explicity recompile it.

Uh... Don't know about anyone else, but I wouldn't use ISNUMERIC for this... case in point...

SELECT ISNUMERIC('13E5')

SELECT ISNUMERIC('13D5')

SELECT ISNUMERIC('13.5')

SELECT ISNUMERIC('13,5')

SELECT ISNUMERIC('$135')

etc... etc...

Don't need Case if there's always a space (ack... I'm a poet and don't know it)

Actually, not quite true... you can "return [apparently] non-deterministic values" if you trick the heck out of it...

First, create a view that looks something like this...

 CREATE VIEW GetNow

    ...

You must have a really old copy of BOL, Carl   Here's a copy of what BOL says about the decimal data type...