Sushila,

You're having one of those days like I did on the trigger thing...

DECLARE @UseIt1 as varchar(100)

EXEC ('SET ' + @UseIt1 +...

Whew!  The number 6 would have really messed me up... I only have 5 fingers on each hand!

Yep... and keep in mind that SELECT/INTO only works once on any given target table unless you drop the table... but that would defeat the archive, eh

Lee,

You used the key words "query the dataset".  Cursors contain a bunch of rows but they can only be worked on or "fetched" one agonizing row at a time.  If...

Sure you do... "Old" = Parent, "New" = Child.  It's a classic hierarchical problem.  There has to be a dozen good articles and lot's of good posts on this forum...

I believe that what you are looking for may be solved with "dynamic SQL".  There has to be a thousand good postings on this forum about it... try a search...

I've found the even Microsoft uses the "undocumented" features   Works for me!

Concure with that... isn't there an autonumbering column or a date/time column or a consecutive ID column of any sort?  How about a clustered primary key?  There has to be something...

I've never seen it fail either (and it's been 10 years)... however, the first article says it's guaranteed to be OK if you create the table with the IDENTITY column...

Thought I'd throw my 2 cents in here because lot of folks run into some real problems when using ranges of dates as criteria...

BETWEEN is fine for date ranges......

Sorry... was in a hurry and forgot that you were using a cursor and I...

Yah... forgot that the NTEXT data type is being used... sorry.

Of course it's only creating one file... that's because you hardcoded the output file name as c:\Person_notes.txt.

You need to make the file name dynamic, as well.  Perhaps using the...

John,

Understood... I just don't make those same assumptions... if the requester knew about those types of things, they might not have needed to ask the original question

If the columns a VARCHAR or the like, you can use SOUNDEX (won't work on numbers).