You are correct in stating that the first piece of SQL identifies all the latest owners and their assets, but by performing a self join back to the orig table...

Not strange really. MS Access is a database, a development environment, an end-user environment  ... it tries to do pretty much everything.

SQL Server is a pure database environment - it...

No problem!

Something like this ... ?

select myTable.ID, myTable.AssetID, myTable.UserID, myTable.DateUpdated

from myTable join (select t2.assetID, max(t2.dateupdated) from myTable t2 group by t2.assetid) t3 on myTable.AssetID = t3.AssetID and myTable.DateUpdated = t3.DateUpdated

where...

OK - that's Analysis Services, not straight T-SQL. Analysis Services is one of Microsoft's business intelligence tools (design of OLAP cubes etc). It is complementary to SQL.

VBA functions do not work directly within chunks of T-SQL, as far as I know. Please post the quote from BOL that says they do.

This works for periods less than 1 day.

declare @secs float

set @secs = 15000

select convert(char(8), cast(@secs / 86400 as datetime), 8)

No, nothing like INSERT UNIQUE - your query is fine.

Do you have a backup of the database anywhere?

If not, you are in trouble.

SPs do not handle user interaction - your app does that.

It should then call SPs, with appropriate parameters, to do the data processing side - whether it be data retrieval,...

As I said, you need to use single quotes.

declare @quote char(1)

set @quote = ''''      --4 single quote characters

'DELETE ' +

' WHERE dssid = ' + @quote + @vchdssid +...

Use single quotes around literals in SQL Server. To debug, try running your statement in Query Analyser and see what happens.

By the way, this looks like a horrendously complex routine for...

Stored procedures should perform better, in general. Network traffic is optimised and SQL Server should be able to reuse execution plans when running SPs multiple times.

When the system finds a 'duplicate', what logic should be used to determine which of them to delete?

Are you using Access to delete the data?

If you are using linked tables within Access, you must ensure that Access knows the primary key of the table when you link...