Sorry Farrell, but Carl is right.

The 103 style operator belongs to the outer convert, not the inner. The inner converts a char/varchar to datetime, and the outer converts that datetime...

Whoa..

..what was the question again? I mean, do you need all this temptable juggling in the first place?

Could the original poster perhaps state...

Oh, no worries - lots of

As for the original question.. well... a 30 page proc, it's...

Well, considering the amount of details provided, it's sort of like 'I have a car. It won't start. What could be the problem?'

(no offense to the poster, though -...

What is the purpose? Can't you just delete the table instead of drop/create?

/Kenneth

Most likely locking or blocking between the proc and some of the nights activities, or something else...

/Kenneth

Hehe, yeah, that's true as well.

Which reminds me then that it seems like 'it depends', since we don't know the purpose of the excercise.

It does work, but it doesn't do anything

The UNION statement is still unordered. It doesn't matter if each subselect is sorted when the...

Please provide both tables, and some examples of data in both tables, and then show which result you want from that.

/Kenneth

There should be a policy that dictates that developers has no business being in the prod system in the first place..?

If that is the case, you could poll master..sysprocesses and...

It's really not that surprising if you stop and think about it for a moment.

How many sorts can you do on a resultset? More than one? That would be very...

See if any of these might be of any help.

http://support.microsoft.com/search/default.aspx?qu=183060&catalog=LCID%3D1033

/Kenneth

Just a small correction to the convert statement. (ie never rely on implicit default behaviours)

select convert(varchar(10),oldDate,121)

..while I'm at it, the above is 99% foolproof,...

Agreed.

Be very careful when and where you use dateconversions.

I sincerely hope that the poster wants to know this for the purpose of display only, and not for writing!

I, as...

Well, when you sort letters like 'abc', you don't really sort by the letters, you use the configured ascii table to find which numbers that 'abc' correspond to, then you...