Wow, that's quite a discussion this has started 🙂

Thanks for all your input guys. I'm now busily trying out UDF's. Unfortunately the XML solution won't work for me -...

Wow, thanks James! That's very useful.  And yep, I'd forgotten you could use max() in conjunction with group by to get the set of latest dates. Much neater a way...

Thanks for the offer, Enthusiast. You are correct that the sales table is not normalized, but that's outside my control; I can only query the database, not change it. 

In...

Thanks for the help. I've done some more playing around and it looks like it's a SQL Server 2005/2000 issue. (I've also realized that although I was accessing the original...