Is there any way to DISTINCT or group by a text (or ntext) in SQL Server 2005?

Question

In a table, I have a column called MEMO_TEXT that is a text data type. When I try creating a view and use a GROUP BY, I get the following error:

SQL S

Answer 1

Do you know that there will never be repeated data in the ntext field? You could do the distinct in a derived table on the other fields and then join to the table with the ntext field and grab it in the outer query.

something like (assume field3 is the ntext field)

select mt.idfield, a.field1, a.field2, mt.field3 
from mytable mt
join 
(select disitinct mt1.idfield, mt1.field1, mot.field2 from mytable mt1
join myothertable mot on mt1.idfield = mot.idfield) a 
   on a.ifield = mt.idfield