Sounds more like it .

I see, this is the kindof solution that can be usefull but on a small scale... Thanks again for the info.

Amen .

The programmers will care if you have 42 tables when 3 could do the same job... what problem are you trying to solve by having 42 tables??

Whatever works... Keep my solution in mind in case you need to have different point system for each question in the same survey (might happen sooner than you think

Another thing is that once you got something in prod, you shouldn't be adding columns all over the place all the time so this stuff just shouldn't happen. You...

UNicode is if you need some japanese characters or something like that. You'll hve to use text if you go over 8000 characters of data on a single line.

Or you could always do the comparaison client side... but it's still gonn be slow as hell.

You change your signature to : The Boss is always right - when I'm not wrong!

Select T1.id, T2.id, T1.col1, T2.Col1, case when T1.Coli = T2.Col THEN '=' ELSE ''...

What are you trying to achieve exactly??

This doesn't seem like a normalized system to me!!!

Something like this?

Select * from dbo.Table1 T1 inner join dbo.Table2 T2 on T1.id = T2.id and (T1.DiffCol1 T2.DiffCol1 or T1.DiffCol2 T2.DiffCol2)

Also why do you want to use set identity insert on?

Are you logging something into another table?

Are you inserting child records?

I have to add that it's the most powerfull tool, if the programmer can figure out all the possible uses.

varchar/text (might need unicode but I doubt it)

I confirm that behavior on sql server 2000 dev edition.

however this doesn't fail :

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[_tblFunc] (

[idfunc] [int] IDENTITY (1, 1) NOT NULL ,

[func] [nvarchar] (50) COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS NULL

)...