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 Posted by Mintyman on 02/21/07 12:02 
Thanks Erland. I was hoping there would be a nice, easy way to do this :o( 
 
Thanks for the options though, i'll look into the SQL Express option you  
talk of. Failing that, i'll try one of the other ones. 
 
"Erland Sommarskog" <esquel@sommarskog.se> wrote in message  
news:Xns98DE80DCF284AYazorman@127.0.0.1... 
> Mintyman (mintyman@ntlworld.com) writes: 
>> I have erronous white space at the end of my 'description' field within  
>> my 
>> 'product' table. I tried using the RTRIM function but it won't let me 
>> because it is a TEXTBLOB (text) field. 
>> 
>> Can anyone show me how to write a query that will update all my rows 
>> automatically? 
>> 
>> I'm using SQL Server 2000. 
> 
> The easiest would almost be to download SQL Express, copy the data 
> over to a table in SQL 2005, but instead of using text, have a  
> varchar(MAX) 
> column, on which you can apply rtrim. Then copy back. 
> 
> To do it in SQL 2000 only, you would have to use UPDATETEXT, and you would 
> have to work one row at a time. I think you would have to read the last 
> 1000 characters or so, with substring, into a varchar variable and then 
> write back with UPDATETEXT. 
> 
> If many of the rows have descriptions shorter than 8000, you could  
> probably 
> do something like: 
> 
>    col = rtrim(convert(varchar(8000), texttol)) 
> 
> Yet another option that may work is say: 
> 
>   SET ANSI_PADDING OFF 
>   CREATE TABLE #temp (keycol int NOT NULL, textcol text) 
> 
> Insert data into #temp and update back with UPDATE. When the setting 
> ANSI_PADDING OFF, trailing spaces are automatically stripped off. 
> 
> As you see, all options I have presented are fairly complex kludges. The 
> new MAX data types in SQL 2005 are so much easier to work with. 
> 
> --  
> Erland Sommarskog, SQL Server MVP, esquel@sommarskog.se 
> 
> Books Online for SQL Server 2005 at 
> http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/2005/downloads/books.mspx 
> Books Online for SQL Server 2000 at 
> http://www.microsoft.com/sql/prodinfo/previousversions/books.mspx
 
  
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