>One problem with this George. My binary number is 80 (!) characters long. The limit on BITSET is 32. Any other suggestions?
>
>I am basically trying to check for which positions are set to "1" in a string:
>For example, if I am testing for locations 8, 12 and 39, I do:
>
>SELECT *
> FROM x
> WHERE SUBSTRING(lcString,8,1) = "1"
> OR SUBSTRING(lcString,12,1) = "1"
> OR SUBSTRING(lcString,39,1) = "1"
>
>This works but it takes some time. I thought about using BITSET and that's why I was trying to convert to numberic. Any other suggestions?
>
>Thank you.

That's one big number ((2 ^ 80) - 1). Frankly, I don't have any really good ideas here. I did think of storing the value as a 10 character field and converting each 8 bits to a character, but that's about the only idea I've gotten and it might actually make the process harder. Perhaps if you gave some baackground as to the problem and the meaning of the field, someone might have an idea that you could use.