thanks everyone, good stuff!

Thank you.

Yes thank you, understand the NOT part, so it should return names with "#" in them; but still does not seem to work right, it appears to be trying to match the sting literally,...

Thank you Ninja, but I think I'm still missing your point.

that query does not return anything but

SELECT * FROM dbo.Table WHERE ColName LIKE '%#%'

does, so there are still forbidden characters...

Looks like this is going to work.

Thanks a million Jason!

Thanks Daniel!! will try it out as soon as I can, great tip.

Wellllll, so far it seems I can have variables, or I can have parameters, but I cannot have both.

Converting everything to package variables and replacing...

Well I'm still at this one.  Haven't figured out why the changes that fixed the first one haven't worked here.  Have seen mentions of using insert statments in...

One down, a more involved one now....

Hey gang, finally got the simple insert to work. Tried lots of different things but the last thing that got...

There is an execute SQL task that sets a user variable in the package having package level scope, that at least seems to happen, then in the parameter...

Here's the error below.

Sorry about that missing quote mark, that got deleted by mistake when I was cleaning up the code sample.

It worked before...

Good Grief, sorry it seems asking a question then makes my eyesight better afterwards.  Don't know why I couldn't see this before.

-ConfigFile "path\ConfigFileName.dtsconfig" is it.

thanks again gang, hope this helps...

I cannot thank you enough for this site and your stewardship of it.  It has been my main port of call since focusing my skills on SQL Server.

From the forums...

It's such a mixed bag. I really like the TSQL language enhancements, having a try/catch has simplified my life a lot.

But with the maintenance plans, the senior DBA-s have decided...

grazie Marco,

Those are very good tips to know, thank you for posting them.

As of now the script version of the clean up task seems to be working well.

For the DB...