You're welcome.... just in case you didn't know... Books-on-Line is free and comes with SQL Server... it's the name of the rather voluminous on-line help that comes with SQL Server.

Scott,

No offense was meant and I agree except that I've seen the optimizer give the non-Case method the win 2 out of 3 times when testing with and without proper indexes...

The CASE statement is very useful, indeed, although I don't think it will increase the performance in this particular case.

"Book-on-Line" is a great resource, once you learn how to use it and actually take the time to read it.  And, I've found that some of the authors that write...

Eheraux,

Your original problem stated:

I have an "OpeningDate" field in a table that's set up as a varchar, but the data it contains is all dates (3rd party app. I didn't...

I believe the time difference is -8 hours so try this...

DATEADD(hh,-8,yourUTCdatetime)

Very nice alzdba!  It's exactly what I needed.  Thanks for coming through on such short notice... I was really in a crunch and you've just made it possible for me...

Here's a straight forward way that probably won't use available indexes...

SELECT yada-yada

  FROM yourtable

 WHERE datediff(mi,0,datecolumn)= datediff(mi,0,datetimelookingfor)

Here's a less straight forward way that will use available indexes...

SELECT...

David,

As promised, here's the actual BCP format file and the call to BCP to use it (from a command window).  This has been working correctly for almost a year.  Of...

I'll find the production code and see if I did anything different...  sorry for the confusion.

Hi David,

The example I gave was modified to be generic from production code that I currently have working in the same fashion offered.  Dunno what to say about the notation...

All good suggestions and I like the simplicity of Fred Wadley's solution.  However, sometimes you can't use Bulk Insert because the DBA won't give you either "SA" permissions or "BULK...

Niel,

There is no such simple T-SQL to remove the IDENTITY property as you would remove a constraint.  Even Enterprise Manager has to do a little song and dance to do...

Morean,

SellerTools' answer can easily be modified to handle 8000 characters just by changing "Declare @sql as varchar(200)" to "Declare @sql as varchar(8000)".  Still, it's dynamic SQL and might be better...

Actually, it can be done without the overhead of Dynamic SQL by using a CASE statement in the WHERE clause....

 SELECT ID,Name,Description 

   FROM Table1

  WHERE Name = 'AA'

    AND ID...