At risk of taking this forum thread on a tangent, a data mart is a subset of a data warehouse. Unless you are working with a very simple business, you...

I'm a beginner at datawarehousing, so you might not put much weight on my response:

The dimensional model is necessary for a datawarehouse. You have described an ODS (see http://www.dmreview.com/article_sub.cfm?articleId=469)....

The original question is, in my words "why does running the stored procedure from the (VB) front end return no rows, while running it from QA returns rows?"

Some ideas:

1. Nocount, 2....

At risk off getting off-topic for this forum, what is the VB code you're using to get the return values?

You say it works in QA. Where else are you calling the the stored procedure from? A VB front end? MS Access? Let us know. The code is not intuitive...

The STUFF function might also help.

UPDATE table

SET AdditionalData = STUFF(AdditionalData,37,4, '0000')

WHERE certaincondition = 1

My first issue:

I often use lookup tables for more than one other table . What would I put in the strCategory column? I would need a child table for multiple categories.

My second was covered in...

A parody, which I take no credit for, of the blue screen of death:

"Windows has shut down improperly. To avoid this happening again, get a more stable operating system."

Try this, too:

Record Scott Anderson's steps (previous post) in Excel in a macro

I found one thing very odd: the connection string...