My managers at work liked it so well, they allowed the term in our coding standards... and, ALL the developers know what RBAR means... no need for a lengthy explanation...

ISNUMERIC does NOT check for numeric characters only... be careful.

Your code to handle the header appears to have a couple of a problems... as you are aware, the Deleted table is empty for Deletes... why does the SELECT in the...

>>Then generate the header record and pick up its unique id – (how do I get this).

Right after you insert into the header table, do a SELECT @variable = SCOPE_IDENTITY()...

Aren't you missing a "TableName" or TableID column?  

I ran your code against the Northwind database (assume that's where you were running it, as well)... Just to be sure, this is your code, isn't it (I added the...

City Index?  Neither the code you posted or my code would even come near a "city" index if the Primary Key was the CustomerID column.

The thing I'd like to add to Steve's good comments is that you should not use SELECT * It's, well... a bit lazy... and...

Actually, you can get ALL the column names at once with the commas at the end with the added benefit of carriage returns in just the right places... run this...

There's that "ISNUMERIC" thing again... see a couple of frames up for the warning

Alex,

Nice article especially for the proverbial "newbie".  I do agree that the examples were a bit overdone but how are ya going to learn if you don't try?

I've found that that is NOT true... not with INT ID's anyway... In my testing of the various solutions posted against this article, I get INDEX SCAN's, not table scans using WHERE (CustID...

Sorry... it's a "Moden-ism" pronounced "ree-bar" and stands for "Row By Agonizing Row"    Why "ree-bar"?  Because it's like the metal stakes stuck in...

Thanks for the feedback, Steve.