I already posted something that disproves that in this very thread... I think this is a lost cause. Let him not use the order by and get bitten later...

HTH.

On a last note, and outer join (left, right or cross) with a where condition like : where SomeCol = @SomeValue basically becomes an inner join if the search criteria...

Select C.CategoryID, C.name, count(*) as Total from dbo.Category C LEFT OUTER JOIN dbo.Comments CM on C.CategoryID = CM.CategoryID and CM.UserId = @UserId

GROUP BY C.CategoryID, C.name

ORDER BY C.name

Are the columns chars() or varchars()? If you use varchar instead of char then the trailing spaces will be removed automatically (or actually not added at all).

You should always use owner.objectname. You only need to add the database name for cross database/cross server queries.

BTW this assumes that Pattern and Color cannot contain nulls

INSERT INTO tblCatalog ( Product_ID, img )

SELECT Product_Id, Pattern + '-' + Color + '.jpg' as img

FROM dbo.Product_Dimension

Do you mean something like this?

Select C.CategoryID, C.name, count(*) as Total from dbo.Category C LEFT OUTER JOIN dbo.Comments CM on C.CategoryID = CM.CategoryID

GROUP BY C.CategoryID, C.name

ORDER BY C.name

I can't help you any further than this... maybe some dts guru will be more fit to solve your problem than me.

Wow, that's a nice quote.

you don't need to specify the dbname unless you are connection do northwind and want to get data from pubs.

It's considered a best pratice to ALWAYS specify the owner of...

I think that xml can be good once is a while... It's like cursor, they have their good use that will beat a set solution... but it happens so rarely...

The boss has started thinking that it's time to start doing a full rewrite of the application... I'll try making him chose the .net environement... and then I'll chose C#...

This is sctricly a guess here, but you're still not qualifying the objects with there owners... I'm really not sure that this is the problem here but it could be...