Thanks for all the help Jack, your syntax examples were useful, the only thing is I had to remove you're "END" statement to get it to run without an error,...

No, no info is on the webpage, it is an anonymous posting of an event, the only thing the database does is keep track of the number of events posted....

In the second code example you have provided defaults for all the parameters except id, so you would only pass in the one parameter that is changing, and all the...

You have lost me there on passing all the column names into the procedure. How would you tell it which one to change and which ones to leave the same?

As...

Man, that was in fact the problem, no single quotes around the ID field value (varchar field) for the "where" clause.

Thanks for that, how ironic that there was nothing wrong...

OK thanks David, I found the post from earlier today

That link is to this page

I did not create the column, it came with the data.

I originaly thought that the count_ID (County ID) was unique, but it turns out that it was only unique...

Thank you Ninja,

I did in fact have to cast the state_ID in order to stop SQl Server from adding the two values together, but it worked. The other problem you...

I read somewhere that SQL Server can convert strings to numbers implicitly.

Using the "+" operator is there no danger that if the string values appear numeric, SQL Server will...

Yes, thank you very much, that helped a lot.

OK I did a work around, I created a new primary key in the cities table and then joined this to the base table (outer join), created a new table...

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I still don't see any code to replace the city name to cityid in the base table, nor indexing, nor foreign keys strategies in place

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Yes, this is now where...

I think what I will actually do is keep that field as a string field and maybe just create a brand new primary key integer field, I have just realised...

Ok but will the B-tree structure be less efficient with string rather than numeric data types?