Might be best to concentrate on lack of normalisation. There tends to be debate on just when it's appropriate to use identity cols / artificial keys etc, but it should...

If for some reason the numbers really must be sequential,(and as others have said, this is rare) then you could generate one in your VB code, or a trigger, maybe in...

Hi Gary

Yes that is a nasty shock! Do you mean it hits every row even when there's a where clause to return just one? eg

SELECT dbo.hhmm(starttime) FROM tblemployees WHERE...

Sorry it's taken me a while to update this, but I've found it now - it's not exactly easy to find . . .

In solution explorer, rt-click your setup project and...

IIRC when you build the 'deployment project' within VS2005 you get the option to include SSEx as part of it.  Sorry I'm not being more specific - haven't got it...

Hi Yuren

from BOL:

Values with the datetime data type are stored internally by Microsoft SQL Server as two 4-byte integers. The first 4 bytes store the number of days before or...

Hi Yuren -

AFAIK it's not possible to resolve the time to anything smaller than milliseconds - certainly not nanoseconds - I guess you meant micro- but my understanding is...

OK just experimented further and found that Isnothing does work with nulls . .therefore something like this should work:

IIF(isnothing(fields!start_date.value),"X",IIF(fields!start_date.value = 0,"X",fields!start_date.value))

HTH

pg

Right - I'm looking at Whidbey, and it so far doesn't seem to have an IsNull ! - it's got Isempty, Isarray, etc but not IsNull.

So I'm not sure about that bit...

PS - I've followed your example and assumed you want to do this in the application, in VBdotnet.

If you want to do it in the SQL (perhaps you're using bound...

How about:

if isdbnull(fields!start_date.value)  OR fields!start_date.value = 0 then

mytextbox.text = "X"

end if

PMFJI but I suspect you're slightly missing the point here. As I understand it, UDF's are mostly useful to create functions that in a sense 'extend' T-SQL - adding functions...

or do you mean VB?

If a=0 Then

s1="a is zero"

ElseIf b=2 Then

s1 = "b is two"