Chris,

Thanks very much.

Deepthy

Thanks for the update.

But joins in the 3 update statements are different.

Not sure of a way to bind them into one statement.

Deepthy

Thanks Suresh. That helped

Thanks Mark your solution worked.

Thanks both. That helped

Thanks both for you suggestions.

I'll research on sargable functions and will try to optimise the query.

It took 90 secs to execute the query on ssms.

thanks that helped

that helped.

Thanks very much

Thanks for the reply cadavre, but the result I am expecting should be

INSERT INTO answers VALUES ('qa200','21/11/2006','2010-03-31 02:06:00','23829')

INSERT INTO answers VALUES ('qa300','1.32','2010-03-31 02:06:00','23829')

INSERT INTO answers VALUES ('qa400','1.25','2010-03-31 02:06:00','23829')

INSERT INTO...

Thanks for the reply

what id Id is not sorted in an order.

insert into outputdatavesrion(ID,OutputId,Outputdatavesrionid) values (21233, 200012,1234)

insert into outputdatavesrion(ID,OutputId,Outputdatavesrionid) values (212274, 200012,0)

insert into outputdatavesrion(ID,OutputId,Outputdatavesrionid) values (212353, 200013,0)

insert into outputdatavesrion(ID,OutputId,Outputdatavesrionid) values...

Thanks for the reply Jeff.

I cannot alter the procedures as I am not supposed to.

I want to instead run the stored procedure in a cursor, is it a good approach?

DECLARE...

Thank that works.

Thnaks for your help

Thank you for the reply.

The spaces in '% '+pattern +' %' are needed. Because if postcode is 764356, and if the search is like '%'+pattern +'%' the control...

Thank you for the reply.

My query is

update address

set clean_postcode = substring(postcode,

patindex('% '+pattern+' %',postcode),len(pattern))

from address inner join lookup on

address.country = lookup.country

where patindex('% '+pattern+ ' %',postcode)<> 0

And my desire output...

thanks Gail.

Thats true