You can call functions from within functions provided they are "determinate"... it is, in my humble opinion, kind of a bad thing to make one function dependent on another.

So far as...

http://forums.belution.com/en/sql/000/110/02.shtml

Very nice...

That's cool...

You can also use NEWID() as the seed for Rand...  in the algo below, "RANGE" is how many numbers you want in the range of random numbers and "OFFSET"...

Here's a self standing sample that you may run with impunity...

This turned out to be a bit long winded because an ORDER BY in an UPDATE in the presence of...

FROM #YourTable y,

        dbo.Tally t

Ok... now I'm confused That is a Tally table in your code, isn't it?

Althought the Jury is still out...

Thanks for the great feedback, Kenneth.  Yep... I know the double barreled last names need some help but James insists that they will all be hyphenated... I sure hope he's...

Thanks for the feedback, James.

Now there's an idea... thanks for pitching in...   hadn't thought about that approach.

If the first column is unquoted data, then the first column BCP would actually import a column (instead of "0" as the target column #) and you would, of course,...

Haven't tried it in Enterprise Manager... works fine in Query Analyzer...

Yep, I agree with Kory...

Also, I believe that moving the reference to constants out of the ON clauses and into a WHERE clause will help a bit...

The other thing may...

Hilight the character, copy it, and paste it into the 'X' below in QUERY ANALYZER... it'll tell you what the character number is...

SELECT ASCII('X')

Or...

SELECT REPLACE(STR(3,2),' ','0')

He did say that is was for fun and it does work for what James posted as a very limited original format