And after finding the proc involving the error, if all substring functions look correct, then the problem lies with the data being processed.

When this kind of errors occurs, it mostly...

There are no 100% guaranteed ways to do this, except the old-fashioned traditional roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-dirty method.

Audit the code, document the flow of calls and...

So you're saying you have never written any program code before..?

...you always (almost) need to have some errorhandling in place for (almost) every code/program you...

You can view a cursor like something that is based on a select statement. It is this select statement that populates the cursor.

So, you may have a table that have...

Yeah, it seems a lot of folks confuses @@error values with return values from procedures.

Here's a small demo showing (what I think) you experienced...

create proc #test

as

--...

Another option well worth considering, is to not enter, change or delete data in EM at all.

Make a habit to do this kind of operations in QA instead. Better...

xp_sendmail returns one of two values (from BOL)

Return Code Values

0 (success) or 1 (failure)

This is how you should check how the proc succeeded with it's intended work.

Just checking @@error after...

It sounds like the first step in lessening your grief and preventing(?) gray hair, is that you step in and remove the ability to add/modify tables from the programmers without...

The point with this 'backward' notation, is that you can update (the other columns) and assign values from columns not updated (ie the PK) in one go.

The net effect is...

Okay, so.. you say that a dupe is made up of either of these, right..?

1. Where payroll, staffid, start_date and end_date are the same.

2. Where staffid, start_date, and end_date are...

Ah, but if you already have a working script that deals with 1 dup, just run it several times then..?? Shouldn't that do it?

/Kenneth

Perhaps you could get away with just an update, and not having to deal with transactions and locking rows to prevent others from reading in 'mid-process' of the retrieval/update..

Here's an...

Ok, I guess you must rewrite the delete procedure..

Let's start from the beginning What makes up a duplicate (ie which columns) from the...

Looks like you're trying to insert the date in the specific format of mm/dd/yyyy ...?

If the column storing the date is a char, then converting dates to a specific style...

If the correct link to sickness days is sickid, then you should retrieve it, and use that to find the corresponding sicknessdays.

If you can't use it because the dupes is made out...