Thank you for the answer. Sorry I got a little snide in that last post, wasn't the best day for me.

Ah, I can understand the confusion.

In the actual scenario, sometimes the field is null in the business table, and sometimes its a previous value that needs to be updated...so I...

Jeff Moden (5/9/2010)

Gosh... a properly written UPDATE takes about 3 seconds on a million rows. They sure are making you jump through hoops.

--Hehe, don't I know it!

My recommendation would...

Quite right sir, when I made the correction it worked beautifully. Does this command perform...

Unfortunately another snag has kicked in. I finally got the code to work but when I apply it to the actual data I get the following error:

Cannot call methods on...

mister.magoo (5/2/2010)

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Here is a quick example (using WayneS sample code)

declare @test-2 TABLE (RowID int IDENTITY, Data varchar(200))

insert into @test-2

select 'some regular text' UNION ALL

select 'email: <bob.jones@domain.com>'...

Thanks guys. I just got exposed recently to the concept of Tally Tables so I took a look again and it will provide exactly what I need. Thank you!

Jeff Moden (4/20/2010)

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huston.dunlap (4/20/2010)

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Thinking about it more I think what I will do is turn the fields into a semi colon delimited list, getting rid of the duplicate fields.

Then I...

Thinking about it more I think what I will do is turn the fields into a semi colon delimited list, getting rid of the duplicate fields.

Then I can implement the...

lmu92 (4/16/2010)

In order to understand what you mean please provide sample data and expected results that actually show what you're struggling with.

Currently, it doesn't make that much sense (to me,...

That would work, with the only note that it tremendously increases the amount of CASE statements I need.

Because every entry is now unique to every record, the number of case...

Thanks Jeff, that definately puts me in the right direction.

However, I do have one complication that may invalidate that direction.

One thing I did not mention in my example is that...

Very good to know, thank you!

I tried the order by idea but I'm coming across an error. Here's some sample code.

Select 'BEGDOC' as BEGDOC

UNION ALL

SELECT BEGDOC FROM TABLE 1

ORDER BY CASE WHEN BEGDOC = 'BEGDOC'...

I tried both of your suggestions.

The [^0-9] idea didn't work, I'm getting far more results than I should.

However, the isnumeric command worked perfectly, thank you.