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All Forums  SQL Server 2000 Forums  SQL Server Development (2000)  Only returning columns that aren't null

Author  Topic  tadi Starting Member 3 Posts Posted - 2001-05-18 : 11:38:12 Hi, I'm in the process of doing a big data conversion from a clients old (horrible) database to a new, normalized structure. In order to do the conversion, I need to load all of the old data into a small visual basic application i wrote to handle the transformation. Here's the problem. The main table that I have to grab data from has 24000+ records, each with 400+ columns. Don't ask why its like that, just know that I'm trying to fix it :) So, my vb app needs to load all of that data into collection classes in order to be able to manipulate it. The problem is, for each record, I have to loop through all 400 of those columns to determine if there is any data in the column that I need to store. I'd rather only return columns in the recordset that don't have null values. Each record only has 10-20 of the columns populated with data, so this would bring my iteration count way down (24000*400 = 9.6 million iterations, 24000*20 = 480k iterations). Is there anyway to build a sql statement to do this? ----- Jason Fox