HTH.

Whereas Celko seems to be more Standard oriented .

are all those files in the same directory??

are the list of files to check for all on the server, or easily transferable?

A self join as you said will do it :

Create table X

(

Name varchar(25) not null,

Ident int null

)

GO

Insert into dbo.X (name, ident)

Select 'a', 3

UNION ALL

Select 'b', null

UNION ALL

Select 'd',...

Why waste time when a good rant is already out...

So what about your opinion Noeld?

Here's one of many :

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/forums/shwmessage.aspx?forumid=9&messageid=152846

What will the new column data mean?

Whyuse a random number in there (seems wrong from a design perspective)?

That's one way of doing this... What problem r u trying to solve with this??

just drop the column with all the nulls in it then recode this script :

ALTER TABLE YourTableName

ADD attribute_id int identity (1,1)

Happy we could help. Did the query came back to the previous speed, or it just leveled at an in-between speed?

Use the function whereever you need it like so :

Select id, dbo.ListTableColumns(id) as LinearColumns from dbo.SysObjects where XType = 'U'

Unless you're planning to go international, I don't see why.

However the programmer has a good point. If at some stage, you need to store japanese text, you'll have to...

Create table X

(

Name varchar(25) not null

)

GO

Insert into dbo.X (name)

Select 'a'

UNION ALL

Select 'b'

UNION ALL

Select 'd'

UNION ALL

Select 'e'

UNION ALL

Select 'c'

UNION ALL

Select 'g'

GO

Select * from dbo.X

GO

ALTER TABLE X

ADD Ident int identity (1,1)

GO

Select...

Do you have an exemple of that?

Wow, thanx for the input.