Oh I'm one of those "all work and no play" types...dull as ditchwater...must start setting aside some playtime now & then...

ps:The problem is I...

Glad to have helped!

#1 most definitely cannot be topped for "coolness"...It would be a "dream come true" for many of us I think!

#2 - I'd rather starve...

This is interesting...I saw the word "programming" in the original post and responded to it as a developer...Steve rounded it off with admin tasks..guess I missed the most important thing...

You could do something like this...

declare @tableName as varchar(100)
set @tableName = (select top 1 name from sysobjects where name like 'table_%'
order by crdate desc)
exec('select * from ' + @tableName)

well - I did think of that first and discarded it only because the result set isn't neatly tabulated...

hmm - jumping into this post only to see if anyone will have a solution that doesn't involve redesigning the tables correctly...

Lowell - do you have time to elaborate on...

Yikes - maybe it's an epidemic!

I've seen 2 similar posts in as many days with the same requirement! Vishal - one of these...

I want to focus on the "candy jar" in this response for I have long been puzzled by the number of people that can't keep away from its' lures...what is...

Man, Ten - serves me jolly well right for not reading something through fully -

Thanks for coming to my rescue!

I'd saved the following "use of undocumented stored procedure" a long time back and unfortunately did not save the site link so cannot give credit where it's due...

Well - here's my list of what I would consider the "basics":

1) Normalization & Relationships

2) Understanding Indexes

3) Defaults, constraints, Rules etc.

4) Data types

5) Creating tables, views, stored procedures & triggers

6)...

Ken Henderson's 'The Guru's Guide to SQL Server Stored Procedures, XML and HTML'

I'm not sure I understand this at all but it seems to me that you want to know if your "exec(@query)" has returned any rows or not...if this is correct,...

...if it comes to that, so's this site - an interruption ie...

I find that the ONLY thing that works FOR not letting the...