got mixed results:

--the same as yours here:

if '' = ' '

 select 'equal'

else

 select 'not equal'

-- returns 'equal'

--that 's different from what u got:

select replace('a"a', '"', '')

-- returns 'aa'

I'm using MS SQL...

to Jesper: 

U wrote: That replaces " by a single space, unfortunately. Is there an easy way to have all quotes in a string replaced by what is known as "the empty string"...

can it be?:

--for stripping double qoutes:

update table_name set column_name = replace (column_name, '"', '')

SELECT *, IDENTITY(INT,1,1) AS RowNum

INTO #Results

FROM table

where ....

ORDER BY .....

SELECT *

FROM #Results

ORDER BY RowNum

the above works just fine. Thanx a bunch, Sushila!

Farrel:

I've tried to add an identity (1,1) column to the source tbl, but the numbers do not get assigned according to the sort I'd need. They are assigned in random...

correction: step 3 sh've read:

3. inserted unique_id into the temp table in the desired order:

insert _Tbl_temp (unique_id) select unique_id

from _Tbl

 order by propertyid, chemid, coef_set_id

Farrel: sorry yr way did not work - I have too many recs (22k) to be able to insert them manually.

to accomplish the task, I had to do the following:

1....

in the prevous post I meant ' create clustered index in Enterprise Manager interface'

just realized that I should not have introduced that new field 'ckey' (and 'pkey' for that matter). I could simply create a clustered (compound?) index for ('chem_id' and 'property_id) and...

correction: 'chemid' in the previous post sh've been representing 'attr_id'

I slightly misrepresented the data structure , but the bottom line is clustered index helped a lot!

I was able to introduce a clustered key 'ckey' in the source table

chemid   prop_id    value     ckey   pkey

203       VC          1.71      1        95359

1655     TPT        160.75      2        24700

1290      TC            552     3        36531

1290      TC         ...

i haven't had a chance yet; at work now, busy w/ smth else 

thanks for yr response. I'm glad I was on a right track after all.

at least I learnt smth new as a result of this exercise

Thanks to everyone for yr time!

I tried to do this without setting up a linked server (i.e. my own machine) on beta - it does not work. I have an administrative right on Beta, so...