You should pray very hard not to let Jean Claude Van Damme or any of his relations to be registered in you system.

People with French, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese descent...

You may query SQL server directly from Excel.

Of course you need to have access to that instance of SQL Server from the machine there you open Excel.

If your code looks complex that it's not correct.

Make it simple and it will work:

select @ret = COALESCE(I4.ID, I3.ID, I2.ID, I1.ID, 0)

from Org o

LEFT JOIN org_lvl4 l4 on l4.Lvl4...

Are you sure?

You may have different ANSI_NULL settings for function and for batch in QA.

<> null

does not work.

Replace it with IS NOT NULL

Will not work from user databases.

Should be

EXEC master..xp_cmdshell 'Dir C:\*.*'

There is a whole bulk of topics under "cursors" chapter in BOL.

There are plenty of suggestions, instructions, recommendations and fabulous examples.

Take some time to read it.

If you don't know how...

Not quite true.

Conversions of float, real, money, or smallmoney to character data types also use styles.

Check...

You're doing select into where?

There must be type mismatch between source and destination.

I believe the simplest way would be padding numeric values with spaces to make them all equal in length.

Functiuon STR would be helkpful for this.

Check BOL for options of this...

You need to pass @rowcount as na OUTPUT parameter to sp_executesql.

[Quote]Since it's only a one time update...[/Quote]

Don't be fooled with such promises.

It never happens.

Don't those other tables get updated time to time?

You gonna need to update that "main" table with...

[Quote]there are no PK's to join on[/Quote]

So, the is no relational database really...

And because of this database tools are not applicable.

All you've got is set of flat files (don't be...

Would not it be easier to just generate a script creating empty database?

Datalength depends on datatype - varchar or nvarchar.

You need to convert value to...