Allright, the trick is to cast the column name as varchar, then it works fine beyond 4000 characters, no matter whether you use the systables or the information_schema views. Also,...

sp_help gives me one column with all column names, which is exactly the information I collect from syscolumns.

thanks anyway

quote:

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Have you tried.

sp_help...

You are right, thanks.

The DATEFORMAT setting determines the behaviour; mine is 'dmy'.

But still, IsDate() seems somewhat weird:

why does "select IsDate(20000228)" and "select IsDate('20000228')" both return 1 with a setting of...

thanks awmuse,

being less discriminate really works. But the problem is not the difference between the set command and the where clause (since when checking the where clause I used "select...