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...

this is what is known as a cross tab query; you are converting rows to columns. you can search for cross tab or pivot to find more examples:

here's an example...

the equivilent of the First() function is SELECT TOP 1 COLUMNNAME from sometable order by COLUMNNAME ;

the TOP function can give you the top 10 like david letterman, or return...

the BULK INSERT function in SQL is the most effecient. If you know the layout of the file will always be the same, and the data rows are the differences,...

sql server agent must be started in order for jobs to execute...is it running? on a laptop, you often do not turn on that service...

if you go to Enterprise manager...