Thanks for your input.  I'll give it a try and see how it works out

I'm a little confused.  What is it that you're trying to accomplish in the end?

Tried that and unfortunately doesn't work.... Thanks for the suggestion

SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER OFF

SELECT "Now ' you can use '' quotes ' in your '' strings"  

SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON

If you're using sql 2000 there is something called Object Search that will let you search for objects of a certain type by name.  Not sure if this feature is...

Are you using 2005?  If so, you can wrap it in a TRY...CATCH block

Looks like first he is deleting anything with a row_number > 1 (since we're partitioning by value this will give you a result set something like:

RegionID  |  RN

1                1

2                1

3               ...

You're absolutely right.  That looks like it would work without having to create the temp table.  I wouldn't have even thought of doing it that way. 

If you want to mess around with it I suggest that you grab the express version.  http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/sql/ .  Lots of cool new stuff

So I just spent 10 minutes writing a response explaining it and somehow lost all my text.... Well, I really don't want to rewrite it, so heres a quick summary. ...

Excellent... Thanks PW, it worked flawlessly.  And Ninja, in my case it didn't really matter what row was updated, just as long as each row was updated with a unique...

Thanks.. That might work for me, although, I might need to tweak it a bit since the problem I'm having is not just dupes in one table, but dupes in...

I thought it was always good practice not to use SELECT * b/c there was an extra performance hit b/c it had to go and lookup the column names?

If you are trying to have a column that has the current date/time whenever a new record is inserted, you can just have a column with a default value of...

If you are doing the count only to check if a record matching your criteria exists, you are better off using EXISTS.. Do the exact same thing as suggested above,...