My apologies, i do have the working solution. What i meant by 'something to work on' is that i have other fields in the table that i need to include...

this gives me something to work with thanks...

basically this is a utility billing transaction history table.

'B' = billing record.

'P' = Payment record

'A' = Adjustment record

and so on.

so now i am trying to come up with a way...

Thanks for all the info/help. We found the issue with the 3rd party sp that was looking for orphaned entries in the lock table based upon the session_id. The users...

Yeah since it is a production server the Admin didn't want to touch it until we created a test server and installed everything on it. But on the test server...

downloading it now, but the local SQL admin booted me off the system. not wanting to install anything else. so we are trying to get it installed to find out...

They will not have admin rights/SQL Console. They will only be using our software to learn/experiment.

as for the amount of data changed they will spend anywhere from 2-5 days...

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[nTable](

[p_key] [int] NOT NULL,

[mf_1] [char](5) NULL,

[mf_2] [char](5) NULL,

[mf_3] [char](5) NULL,

[mf_4] [char](5) NULL,

[mf_5] [char](5) NULL,

[cf_1] [int] NULL,

[cf_2] [int] NULL,

[cf_3] [int] NULL,

[cf_4] [int] NULL,

[cf_5] [int] NULL,

CONSTRAINT [PK_nTable] PRIMARY KEY...

i guess i could put the results into a table then use a cursor and process all the rows and use the value in the cf_field(real column name is stored...

actually i am looking more for something like this

select pkey, mf_value, mf_field, REPLACE(mf_field,'mf_','cf_') as cf_field from table1, table2

unpivot

(mf_value for mf_field in (mf_1, mf_2, mf_3,..., mf_50)) as pvtTable where mf_value =...

OK I can use the UNPIVOT to get me the information of the mf_# that contains a matching value.

select pkey, mf_value, mf_field from table1

unpivot

(mf_value for mf_field in (mf_1, mf_2, mf_3,...,...

Not sure how to use UNPIVOT but i will do some checking to see if it will do the job.

Thanks...

i agree with that my suggestion was to change the table into 2 tables master/detail but had no say in the final outcome. so i am stuck with using the...

That is what i settled on.

Thank you.