Sure, Dennis... having a bit of a lack of sleep going on myself, here's an example using the Northwind database...

    USE NorthWind

DECLARE @Year CHAR(4)

    SET @Year...

Concur... doesn't sound like the Developer ever heard of the IDENTITY property of a column.  Using the IDENTITY property does have some other uses, as well... think of it as...

I just gotta remember to read the last page  ... Serqiy already made a similar suggestion.  Guess a concurrence never hurts though...

This will successfully convert characters in the DD/MM/YYYY format into a DateTime datatype without much fanfare...

CONVERT(DATETIME, yourstringdate, 103)

Here's an example you can try...

DECLARE @ddmmyyyyString CHAR(10)

    SET...

I dunno... 6 bytes, 4 bytes, 8 bytes... for me, I'd still be tempted to use DateTime just because of all the things you can do with DateTime functions without...

I agree... BCP is a great tool especially when you learn how to use the format files.  You could also try a simple OSQL call using the SELECT of your...

Here, here! I second the thought!

Thanks for the offer, Ken... we're all set.

Great article!  And, I didn't like the Merge Into function anyway...

Jesper, thanks for pulling me off the ceiling... you're the best.

Yep... I agree with Trigger... don't ever use @@IDENTITY because if a trigger fires and that trigger inserts into another table, @@IDENTITY will not contain the value you think it...

Ummmm.... you could us sp_lock to see if the table is being worked on by the type of lock it has.  You would, of course, need to know the ID...

You bet, Charles.  Thank you for the feedback.

Great idea... a word of caution, though.  I've found that sp_Depends will sometimes miss things... I believe that problem is also documented (somewhere) on this forum.  Not sure if they...

What was the solution you came up with?  Thanks.