Ah, silly me, that should have been OR, not AND

Anything wrong with the good old,

WHERE col1 IS NOT null

AND col2 IS NOT null

AND col3 IS NOT null

...

AND col20 IS NOT null

what about the USER_NAME() function? This works in 2005, unfortunatly I don't have 2000 to check it on.

This will return the user name of the currently connected user, eg. 'sa',...

As a side note, that should be char(13) + char(10) [CR LF] according to the email standard.

Also when testing you can use:

print @message

This will display the line breaks as well...

I don't think so, mirroring works at the database level.

The simple problem of when some one tries to ask you to find duplicate numbers in such a field, the seperate table with appropriate keys would have prevented this, finding...

Instead of storing integer data comma seperated in a single column, could you move this data into a seperate, related table?

Ah good point, my inner join should have been a left join

> is it possible to test if no rows are returned and substitute something more friendly like "no information available"?

Would this be something better handled by the application?

You could use a sub query:

TABLE x (

    a int

)

TABLE y (

    a int,

    b int

)

SELECT a, b

FROM x

INNER JOIN (

    SELECT TOP 1 a,b

    FROM y

    ORDER BY b...

Ah, so products contains a super set of all products say? and bikes are just those products that are a bike, and parts are just those products that are part?

Thus...

I normaly have the scripts that modify the DB from the current live version to the current development version set up to run as a batch file.

Thus one way could...

alternative way to loop if you want all the rows (dt is the datatable)

For Each row As DataRow In dt.Rows

'Do stuff with row

Next

I think sql express often likes to install with an instance name of something like SqlExpress so you might need to use "(local)\SqlExpress" as the data source (or what ever...

How well would the windows indexing service work? Store the files in the files system and use that and not sql server? Not sure what sort of speeds you'd get...