John thanks for taking the time to explain how UK postal codes work;

I've only being only exposed to US postal codes, which are all numeric but can have preceeding...

you don't want to actually delete anything, because dev databases might contain the most cutting edge stored proc some developer has been working on or something, so you want to...

there's a few things you should check:

first off, does "select *from table " return any rows? here we determine that data exists.

second, could it be that the db is case...

even mysql says that stored procs are useful, faster and more secure...they also say their implementation of stored procedures is not yet complete...

for an expert to contradict the database provider...

this might get you started; LEFT,RIGHT and SUBSTRING functions can be used to get parts of strings.

note how im checking to make sure that the field is at least 8...

well, it depends on the field you are examine...is the field a "name" field? so you are going thru the data and making a best guess at the gender, or...

i noticed in the example you pasted, and also in the web page example, it is using extended ascii characters for the quotes (left dbl quote and right dbl quote)...

you might want to paste your procedure here; some of us can point out any spots where the procedure might be able to be optimized. I think you glazed over...

sql_er no it does not address the issue where a tablename might span across  the 4000 char mark in syscomments;

in my case, i check sysdepends and this, and it's "good...

try SELECT name, age FROM users WHERE ISNULL(age,0) = ISNULL(@age, 0)

if it's taking 1.5 hours to complete, i bet it's got a row by row cursor on a big table, and whatever it is doing might be optimized into one...

Stephen's right...you could use a case statement to avoid the < 20 pitfall:

CASE WHEN len(Incident_Details.Description) < 20 then '' ELSE

substring(Incident_Details.Description, 20, len(Incident_Details.Description) -19) END AS...

peter I'm having a similar issue when i try to do it as well in my 2005 test server.

I never created my info views based on other views, so in...

it's the alias for the count....we still need the schema and datasample to give a meaningful answer.

SELECT USER,

CASE WHEN ISNULL(APPLICATION1,0)=0 THEN 0 ELSE 1 END  +

CASE WHEN ISNULL(APPLICATION2,0)=0 THEN...