I do know what to do on each layer and trust me you both are wrong, no other data engine, or layer, linq, entity framework, Datasets loops or whatever, nothing...

Pretty sure that nobody is going to be able to help you with such a vague question. We need some ddl and sample data along with the desired output from...

Not really sure what you are trying to but this will never work as it is. Here is your code formatted for readability.

declare @n1 int

declare @n2 int

declare @c1 int

set @n1...

This begs the question....do you really need the cursors in the first place? There are very few reasons or situations where a cursor is needed. With very few exceptions a...

Yeah I...

One thing to keep in mind. You mentioned that this is a third party app and that you will have periodic updates. You will probably want to create a script...

Excellent. Thanks Lowell. Of course now I have no excuse not to work this afternoon. 😛

Well actually the whole idea is to have your view take over the name of your current table. Then dml statements would remain the same. Let's say your current table...

Maybe you are not aware that you can create updateable views? Here is an article from BOL. I think what has been somewhat referenced by all of us but NOT...

That really is a formatting issue which is best left to the front end. Let whatever you are using to pull the data format it for you instead of trying...

I guess I win by default since it is a new award and I am the only nomination. WOOT!!!

Sounds to me like management has mandated that you provide visibility to sensitive information that at the very least in incredibly unethical (which obviously you realize since you are trying...

You can't. But like i said the whole field should be encrypted when it is stored. You should not store plain text SSN for the same reasons you don't store...

that is an odd requirement but you can achieve this with nested replace statements easily enough.

Given that what you are trying to protect is SSN shouldn't it be encrypted in the database in the first place? Sensitive information of this nature really should not be...