You don't need to use regular expressions, PATINDEX would do the trick (and also allow for other time zones' dates in the data).  Starting position can be determined by :

select...

If you could post a (smallish, representative) sample of your text data and roughly what you might want from it, you'd probably be inundated with tips.  It's a bit difficult...

I reckon you can use the nslookup utility from a (windows) command line console. 

nslookup 172.21.210.15

might return something like:

Server:   domaincontroller.mydomain.booyah.net

Address: 172.21.120.10

Name:    resolvedDNSname.mydomain.booyah.net

Address ...

Ummm...  and apologies to the performance tuners who have just shrieked with outrage - yes, there are probably more efficient ways of doing the comparisons..   my point was about the data...

Yeah, the above would be OK if the datestamp column was a datetime. 

It's possible that it has been defined as varchar(10-ish), in which case you'd be advised to do...

Well, ignoring issues of ambiguity (dd/mm/yyyy or mm/dd/yyyy?)

select convert(varchar(10),convert(datetime, '2/2/2002'),101)

works fine for me.

I'd strongly suspect query timeout (meaning the update / insert / delete statement which caused the database growth in the first place).

Looking at the error i'd bet that your query timeout is...

If your DBAs have any self respect they'll have locked down xp_cmdshell so it can't be used. 

Since the poster's starting point was QA, it...

I think what my esteemed colleague might be trying to say is that there are easier, more natural ways of achieving the same result, without using the temp table.  For...

Using any CPU metric as a gross indicator of performance is dodgy.  Performance, surely, should be measured by how long the operation takes to complete (i.e. elapsed time) not how much...

Muthukkalavalli,

What you are probably after is the SQLXMLBulkLoad tool, available as a separate download.  There's a How-to article at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/sqlxml3/htm/bulkload_6bos.asp and several other resources at other pages.  Search for...

Thank you.  One of those "obvious when you think about it for more than a couple of minutes" situations, but aren't they they the best sometimes?

Good tip.

The problem seems to be more about expectation of retrieval order, rather than the insert order.

AFAIK bcp / BULK INSERT will deal with the data in the order dictated by...

Let's add this to the ever-growing list of "Reasons why dynamic SQL is evil"

Hmmmm...    surely there's more to this?

1.  For a deadlock there should be 4 statements - 2 to compete for locks, and 2 to have created the locks that the other...