I will second the copy/drop/rename solution.

Or, in my case, drop/rename/create as I was doing a SELECT INTO of 750K

rows every few minutes from an intermediate table. It was quicker to...

Uh oh... Jeff Moden was my hero for a bit with his QUOTENAME suggestion.

How fickle are the fleeting fortunes of fame - consider this:

[font="Courier New"]DECLARE @s-2 VarChar(4000)

SET

It won't. Cast doesn't do anything special to set the size of varchar and varchar defaults

to a length of 30.

Empirical testing shows that...

Sergiy, my apologies for not being clear. The data is completely in SQL Server.

When I say I don't know what the data is in advance, it is because I don't...

Sergiy (11/2/2007)

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The task sounds like text processing.

I don't see anything related to databases in it.

I believe T-SQL has nothing to do with it.

There are many other, more effective tools for...

Interesting idea. Are there any types QUOTENAME can't handle?

I hadn't even given it a thought because the T-SQL ref says:

QUOTENAME ( 'character_string' [ , 'quote_character' ] )

However,...

Sorry, when I said fields I meant columns.

It is a table where I need to convert every column value to varchar. I don't have anyway of knowing

the number of columns...