I found it; it's two pieces of the puzzle...it must be a system function, and it ALSO must be owned by 'system_function_schema' ... NOT dbo:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa224829(SQL.80).aspx

SELECT UID FROM master.dbo.sysusers WHERE...

like above, I've never hit a limit on the number of values in the IN() statement, and read it gets converted to a temp table by SQL Server;

I've gotten an error...

definitely not a best practice, i admit...I was just showing by example that just because something is a marked as a system function, does not make it available to ::fn_...

i have been bitten by this bug 6 times this week; some of my posts couldn't have taken me over 3 minutes to type, others were huge detailed answers....I'm a damn decent...

oh and the 41 second thing? try it yourself....paste my query and run it...it will be slow the first time...SQL Server will save a plan for that query in case...

what a meant was i would do this:

CREATE VIEW VW_EQPMAS AS

SELECT EQPNUM,

LEFT(TXTEXT,

      CHARINDEX(CHAR(13) + CHAR(10),TXTEXT,--6th vbCrLf

        CHARINDEX(CHAR(13) + CHAR(10),TXTEXT,--5th vbCrLf

          CHARINDEX(CHAR(13) + CHAR(10),TXTEXT,--4th vbCrLf

            CHARINDEX(CHAR(13) + CHAR(10),TXTEXT,--3rd...

the charindex(... 6 levels deep is incredibly slow with no execution plan...on my test table with 2 rows, it took 41 seconds...41!!! on the first pass as an execution plan...

Antares686 raised a lot of good points. Here's an idea: it looks like the first 6 lines are a header, adn have the same format....so for example, does line 6...

the row terminator \n would be a carriageReturnLineFeed; i assume that the file does have that, right? (opening it in notepad shows more than one line?)so you can get multiple...

that's what i get for rushing out an answer;

David Burrows, as usual, is correct.

NOT Exists...

the fields are TABLE_NAME and COLUMN_NAMe...with underscores;

select * from information_schema.columns where table_name='' and column_name=''

i saw one guy said when he re-installed the last service pack for sql server, it fixed his machine;

but more importantly, it looks like some security setting that was added...

information_schema views are the most correct way to do it;

IF EXISTS(select * from information_schema.columns where tablename='programversion' and columnname=@col )

BEGIN

SET @sql = 'ALTER TABLE [programversion]  ADD [' +...

you can change the default location for all the VS stuff; it is stored under the registry under the following key(s): Visual Studio 2003 is 7.1, and 2005 has a...

i do that kind of import a lot...probably better ways to do it, but this works really well for me;

the example below is typical of what I use...the table "FINAL_LAYOUT"...

SQL 2000 behaved differently than 2005; in 2000, from a logical point of view, if they can read and write a table, they must be able see it's structure as...