Thanks everyone. Looks like if it's likely to be the same speed and is likely to become unsupported I should stick to using JOINs only.

I think SQL that uses JOIN...

Thanks Mike. All my questions are answered!

All the best, Bill

Thanks Mike. All my questions are answered!

All the best, Bill

BCP works great. For the record I've put the T-SQL I used at the bottom of this reply.

Having written to a text file I can see BCP will be really...

Mike, I've looked at an introduction to bcp.exe on the web and it seems very straightforward I'll incorporate it into my T-SQL to write out multiple text files for each...

Thanks for the advice Daniel. To get the looping I used the second example on this web page which uses some ActiveX:

http://sqljunkies.com/Article/A8CB0AFE-D143-4B49-B865-4FBBFEDFCCD7.scuk

I still had the problem of not...

 Thanks guys this method does the job. I don't mind dirty!

Cheers, Bill

Thanks PW,

This will do the job great.

Cheers, Bill

Thanks Steve,

This weasel is back on track.

Bill

Aaron,

Many thaks this solution it works great .

I think you've provided a correlated sub-query which I should learn more about as they...

David,

Many, many thanks. I used your final suggestion. 

It's such an elegant solution compared to what I was using.

Cheers, Bill

Thanks David,

This looks like what I'm after. You're solution is very comprehensive. I can't get it to work though as I have probably misunderstood the principle.

My problem is simpler than your suggestion,...

Thanks Richard,

I see that CHARINDEX looks for a string occuring inside another.

You've put it in the WHERE statement but I can't work out how I would then join my tables?

Bill

Really enjoyed reading this discussion though it was beyond my understanding in many parts!

Coming back...

Thanks again Thomas!

This is what worked:

table1.name LIKE '%' + table2.name + '%'

Cheers, Bill