Posted by David Portas on 12/07/05 22:28

imani_technology_spam@yahoo.com wrote:
> One more problem: there could be hundreds of categories, and we dont
> know in advance how many categories there will be.

What's the problem? With the script I posted you don't need to know the
number of categories. You do need to set some upper limit on the number
of notes for each category but given that the maximum size of a VARCHAR
is 8000 and that your note column is 7K characters that may not be a
problem either - the number of notes you can support with this or any
other SQL query is possibly quite small anyway.

If you want to concatente the notes to a TEXT / NTEXT column then I
think you really will have to use a cursor.

--
David Portas
SQL Server MVP
--

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