After years of having the DBA here beat me into submission,...

That's what I was getting at 🙂

Depending on the file sizes, you'd either just need to read the whole of each...

Seems like an unnecessary complication if all you're doing is merging files. Why not do it in C#, or VB or something?

If it's an intellectual exercise, read the following...

After getting the last 4 wrong, it was nice to get one right for a change. . . 🙂

yes, yes. I know. But I'm a .net coder, only recently decided...

DECLARE @teststring VARCHAR(65)

SELECT @teststring = 'St.John'

IF PATINDEX('%[A-Z,0-9]%',@teststring) > 0

PRINT @teststring

ELSE

PRINT NULL

-edit-

Didn't see the post above me before I hit submit. I prefer mine, but I'm not a SQL developer -...

Just posting the file contents so ppl don't need to download. (no, I don't know why it wouldn't post for you).

CREATE TABLE dbo.TmpOrder (

Sequence INT IDENTITY(1,1) PRIMARY KEY,

ProductID INT,

Colour varchar(10)...

Is the file to be loaded later by another application?

If so, I stick with my original assessment - do it in the presentation layer. C#, VB.Net, Java etc, are all...

What reason are you doing it for? Personally, I would always do this sort of thing at the front-end, rather than the DB.

SELECT *

FROM [dbo].[tblPrice]

WHERE [fldPrice] => 10000

AND [fldPrice] =< 100000

-EDIT- sorry, wrote between 1 and 10 instead of your values.

Thanks for that. I've added an ORDER BY StartDate so I can keep things orderly, then added a quick script to test the time taken for the script to run....

My apologies, I meant to give you some sample output.

I'd want something like: -

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

ID - | -- Address - | - Start Date --------------- | ID - | -- Address...