Brian,

David is on the right track with a function but, here's some simpler code that uses classic "base" conversion techniques... it may be just a bit faster because it's 100%...

SELECT NEWID()

Use substring to get a piece if you want.

Ami,

I didn't take the time to convert this to your table or column names.  If you are using INT for your ID's, it's good to 727 levels... usually more than...

First, I'd have to ask why do you need a more definitive answer?  The simple truth of the matter is that's the way they made it and none of us...

Farrell,

You didn't read far enough down where I said "Adam Mechanic would probably remind you about the need for auxilary calendar tables or at least a numbers table...".  Or were...

Dunno about all the DST and GMT stuff, but here's a way to find the last Saturday of a month given any date in that month... since it includes time,...

This works...

SELECT CAST(YYYY+MM+DD AS SMALLDATETIME)

The reason why it works is because yyyymmdd is one of the (ISO) recognized datetime formats... no need for the slashes or anything...

I can't take the credit for the following but it does the job for me....

"Normalize 'till it hurts... Denormalize 'till it works."

>This is a presentation issue, hence my second select will give you the output you want, but that is not really a SQL Server job

It depends... if there's no presentation...

As a "best practice", you should always use at least the two part naming convention, which includes the user name.  There's dozens of articles on this recommendation on the Web......

>because DB programming is almost the same in oracle and in sql 2000

Boy oh boy are you in for a surprise!  Take, for instance, that SQL Server 2000 has a...

Couldn't see the forest for the circumlocution

I don't get it, Neetu... you posted...

RefNo   Pro_No         Country

1.        11,22,33,44    X

2.        33,44,22,11    Y

3.        44,55,33,22    Z

Explain to me why 44 is in RefNo 1, why 33,44 is in RefNo2, and why...

You bet, Henk... thank you for the feed back.

I gotta know... what's comical about it?