I would use a trigger, which sets all any original '1's to '0'. That way, you only have to worry about setting the new one to 1, and the old...

No, you don't need a cursor.

I would start by listing the ids, and their earliest instance.

select t.id, min(t.time)

from tbl t

group by t.id

Then you can work out what the first time...

Sorry - it was just a typo, putting 'desc' instead of 'asc'.

If you can describe what your actual problem is, it should be fairly easy to get a solution using...

Of course... when I refer to 'tblEmployees' above, you would have EMPLOYEES. I just want to make it clear that it's a table name.

3. EXEC ('SELECT ' + @tablename + ' , E.EMPLOYEEID FROM ' + @tablename + ' E ')

This will fail because it translates to:

SELECT tblEmployees , E.EMPLOYEEID FROM tblEmployees E...

I think it's a really bad way of doing it, because it doesn't seem right to return the data that way. Much better to return two sets of data, which...

Worth noting that you can get a list of everyone's best rows with:

select * from #tbl t

where t.i =

(

select top 1 t1.i FROM #tbl t1

where t1.pid = t.pid

order by...

You shouldn't use a cursor for this, you should just use a query.

If you give a few more details, then it should be easier to get some code sorted for...

Yes, sorry. I was writing it the Oracle way, where you can use rownum like that. I haven't played with SQL2005 enough yet to work out some of the tricks...

Yup. That's right. If you have a few million rows, then this isn't a good way of doing it.

In SQL2005 with RowNumber, you'll be able to pick some random numbers...

Nope. You can list the servers which are 'linked', using sp_linkedservers, but listing all the SQL Servers on a network isn't something that T-SQL is designed for.

Sorry. You'll have to...

Tom,

I think I mis-read your question anyway... you're not really looking for overlaps - in fact, the hospital records won't overlap. You're looking for the gaps.

Try this (uncomment the lines...

Finding overlaps is just a matter of looking for two date ranges where both start dates are earlier than both end dates.

So you can easily join a table with itself...

MS-Access? You just set up 'Relationships'. Perhaps you'd get better answers in an MS-Access forum.

Good luck for running a website on an MS-Access database. Not something I'd ever do.

No problem.