All,
Many thanks for your thoughts on the merging of columns. The tr method would have killed all the delimiters as a few people noted. The || method in SQL was the winner, although the final table this has to be done to (4 million records) should kill the system for a while!!!!! Must make sure I've got enough disk space to do it all as well. Maybe doing it a section at a time would be in order.
Thanks to all,
Gary MacMinn