Hi Ed,

I really appreciate your reply and this somewhat reflects our own experience and knowledge.

The STATA script in question is being amended so that less columns are rows are been...

Hi,

there isn't a front and end the columns dropped have never been used. It was originally put together with too many columns and lots of good intentions.

I do understand your...

ps....a CSS for SQL code would be amazing !!!

Hi,

thanks everyone for the great advice and after looking at what's on offer I decided to go for a low cost cheap and possibly lazy method which is creating what...

Hi, belated thanks for the great advice.
I went for the Powershell approach and set it up the job with a CmdExec job step which worked just fine.
Thanks again,
Emoan

Hi,
belated thanks for the great replies.

I have decided to go for the Powershell route and have a follow-up question.

Running the command at the powershell prompt...

nothing beats answering your own question.......
It was a missing driver.
I had to installed the SQL Server 2012 Native Client. Everything ok now.
Thanks,
Eamon

so close yet so far away!
You're a star Jonathan AC Roberts!
Thanks,
Eamon

Thanks for the great guidance Guys.
After a couple of diffrrent approaches I've went with setting them variables and it works fine and makes sense.

Thanks again,
Eamon

Hi everyone,

much belated thanks for all your help on this.

I tried various things but the approach that worked for me was "update the field to NULL, delete...

That's a very interesting answer and interesting approach.
I just might give that a go.
Thanks alot Aaron.
Regards,
Eamon

Hi John,

this is what I thought (but I figure I would ask in case a new piece of SQL functionality has later versions to allow otherwise).

Many...

Thanks alot!

I think for this scenario a case statement works best for me.

thanks alot for the replies, I appreciate it.

Thanks,

Eamon

Thanks alot, that works.

I think though upgrading our server is probably the real answer!