Thanks for the reply.

Unfortunately, our deployments don't have Powershell yet. I'll keep this in mind for later.

Can this be morphed into something that would be called from a...

Another thing to take into consideration is the setting of ANSI_PADDING at the time of table creation.

If it is set to ON, the trailing space(s) are preserved when the rows...

To get rid of the errors:

1) Paste into new query window

2) Select the whole query

3) From the toolbar, choose Edit\Advanced\Delete Horizontal White Space

Jeff, many thanks for that article. I've seen so many people shoot themselves in the foot, exactly as you describe. Gee, I MAY have done it myself...

As was...

Ok, we solved this one.  Turns out, the SQL datatype of the parameter needs to be set to SQL_VARCHAR, rather than SQL_CHAR. 

Didn't matter in Access, matters a LOT in...

My main problem with this article is that I, like several others, had trouble deciding whether the writer was serious or not. 

If serious (which is my personal opinion since...

Atiq,

Thanks for expaining that.  It wasn't clear to me, either. 

You haven't found a way to make the '5' variable, have you?

That's good news, Calvin.

I'll try it in the next build of the product.

Now THAT'S nice. 

There are other variables besides the TOP X, such as start/end date/time, organizational units, etc.  The underlying table has about 7 million rows, and is updated daily,...

John,

Good thought.  Impractical in this case, though.  I currently have NO idea what the users are going to select, so I can't code myself into that kind of corner (already...

Worth a try.  Thanks.

Yeah, the whole point of the question was how to do it without the dynamic SQL.

I converted it to non-dynamic, selecting everything, expecting ROWCOUNT to limit the result.  It worked...

Aaron,

I'll try the cursor, but I'm guessing you're right about the speed.

Definitely can't select all of the results.  MANY orders of magnitude more than is likely to be requested.  I...

Jim, 

I just found that technique over the weekend, and implemented it today.  Works great, as you know.

Do you know if there are any performance penalties for defining the linked...

Jim, if the inter-database communication were on a larger scale, I would investigate your suggestion.  Our design only has 5 tables that are 'shared', and there are never more than...