Oh no, no, no.... this is a lot easier than that... but I need you to post the CREATE statement for the table...

Heh-heh... My first inclination was to say "don't use text columns"   I won't even allow them into code at work because of...

Thanks Nick... I'm still curious though... why do you need to change the datatype of a column in a view?

I was leaning towards the previously suggested idea of some sort of permanent table for this and then I started thinking "spid" and then David stole my thunder

Yeah.. that's what I was kinda getting at... if it's all SELECTs, what's the problem

Also, what I've found is that a lot of...

Yep... I knew that, Mark I just didn't think that Shine recognized that because he said your code change didn't work and...

Yep... First, I changed the function to capture the data type... again, you'll need to change the name of the function...

 CREATE FUNCTION dbo.fnColumnsUpdated

        (@TableName SYSNAME, @BinaryColNums VARBINARY(128))

        RETURNS...

THAT would certainly be a limit, huh?   Yeah, I know they reached the end but then they said they'd limit it to 300...

Mr B... PRINT is exactly what you are looking for... if you don't want the rowcounts to show up in "standard" format, you can do a SET NOCOUNT ON and...

Books Online... comes free qith SQL Server... lookup "Database Design" (I think)...

Mark left out one part and if you did, too, you WILL get the same results... your GROUP BY has to be by the same formulas that Mark gave you...

Outstanding list, Rudy... I'd like to bump your rounds down 1 and add a new round 1... "Write scalable code to start with."

Don't think that's quite what Nick meant...

Nick... You can do this by creating your view like this....

 CREATE VIEW dbo.someviewname AS

 SELECT CAST(dflt_cyl_ctf AS DECIMAL(18,4)) AS dflt_cyl_ctf,

        CAST(cyl_ctf_actv AS INT)...

As some have correctly suggested, unless you do backups everyday, you should have the "recovery mode" set to SIMPLE.

DO NOT LIMIT THE LOG FILE!!!  IF IT TRYS TO GROW BEYOND...

Ok... first, thank you very much for making my life easier for testing... the good news is, I get no errors with the following test code.  The bad news is...