Thanks to Rob Farley and Peter Larsson.  I have tested Peter's code and it works beautifully.  I have never used VarBinary, so have to dig deep into this.

To Ryan Randall...

Hi David,

Thanks to your reply.  Your answer clarified my doubts (if I wanted rank, then there will be duplicates). 

All your queries worked without the ranking.

Once again thanks for your time. ...

Hi all

Thank you very much for your answers. 

While I can use the variable and it works fine but the problem arises when the primary table does not contain the search...

Thanks for all your help.  I didn't want the number of subcategories, but if the subcategories existed, the categoryname should have appended with something else, if not then just the...

Thank you very much Sushila.  Your second option works like a charm.  I really appreciate your help.

Also thanks a lot to Sergiy - eventhough the query as given didn't work,...

Govinn - Thanks a bunch.  Works perfectly.  Would never have figured out myself.  That's why I love these forums.

To Sushila:

Thanks for helping.  It wasn't in a single table - which...

Thanks a lot PW.  Works perfectly.

Hi michanne,

Tried your solution, but this wouldn't work (or should I say didn't work) because it is throwing an error informing that it could not convert the varchar to int. ...

Thanks to all of you.  Yours views helped me a lot.  Problem solved.