Brenda,

Sorry for the delay... it's a tough question and deserves a good answer.  Undoubtably, you've had a thousand people tell you that this can't or shouldn't be done in SQL. ...

In this case, I think (small modification of) Paul's solution is going to be the fastest if there is an index on the FromDate column... just remove the "=" sign...

Sorry for the delay ... did you figure it out or do you still need some help on this...

Since the permanent table now exists, you could make the following changes and it should work...

--===== Truncate the existing table

TRUNCATE TABLE ben_MyTemp1

--===== Your original query with a...

Jeff,

Actually, "Old Hand" is a status, not a name.  MKEast gave you that fine solution.  And, I sympathize with you... have had to do much formatting in SQL Server...

Ben,

I think Paul has steered you in the right direction...  I've added his suggestion to your code... give it a shot...

--===== If the temp table exists, drop...

Don't think it's going to be quite that simple... you'll need to add a GROUP BY in order to include an aggragate function in the Select list in the presence...

Marshall,

Man, if that worked, this forum probably wouldn't even exist... life would be much too simple... .  You can't mix variable assignements with...

Just curious... what do YOU do when there is no front end as in when you're exporting files that have to meet certain formatting criteria?

Dunno if this helps but if you save the output of a GRID in QA, it doesn't get saved with commas between columns... it get's saved with tabs which is why...

If the users of the file will always be "in-house", consider creating a spreadsheet that get's it's data from a stored procedure using a pass through query in External Data.

Noeld,

Thanks... The reason I suggested it is that it doesn't look like the DBCC command accounts for index size or reserved space.  Do you know if it does or is...

...and thank you all for the feedback.

You bet... thank you for the feedback.

Noeld,

I haven't figured a way around it yet but the function needs to return a "5" instead of the "1" it does for 02/01/2006 according to what the user posted...