I appreciate the compliment but I didn't do anything... my comment was actually directed to Mohammed's fine and easy solution. 

John is correct... using the system tables would certainly work,...

So... how many rows must you examine (do this for)?

Cache.  It's not supposed to happen but I've seen it before.  Could be something else but I'd have to see all of the code to figure it out.

Views of views of views to feed DTS... I once raised my arm over my head in a very funny way and it hurt like hell.  I went to the...

Way to go Nigel!

DATEFIRST isn't server sensitive and is not a system wide setting when invoked from QA... it's session/spid sensitive...

Run the following in one QA window...

SET DATEFIRST 3

SELECT @@DATEFIRST

Run this...

Nicely done... very nice, indeed.

Of course, if you want to go with total formatting of the version column for ease of sorting in the future...

--===== If the test table already exists, drop...

Rich,

If your version numbers will never have more than 4 parts, here's a good start without a UDF... the first two sections of the code below are just to setup...

Change the EXEC(@SQL) to PRINT @sql and debug that... that will lead you back to the problem in your dynamic SQL.

Ok, I'm a bit confused... Rose posted "Queries can take hours to run, and performance is the major issue.  To be honest, there is not a lot of relational data."

I'm...

Remi... I think you may have confused a couple of people because you didn't include any documention in your test script to identify the fact that most of your code...

UPDATE Customers SET Last_Name = REPLACE(@LastName,'''','''''') WHERE Cust_ID =  'A34778'

Do heed the other's warnings...

Step 1... For "queries from hell", the first step would be to "knock the hell out of it".  Format the code so you can actually read it instead of having...

Heh... David, it is I who is not worthy... thank you for your continued compliments.  You made my whole day!  Good "seeing" you, again.

Anyway, folks... considering the trully variable nature...