Help needed with complex query

Hi,

I have a sql table, over 30 milion recs, with the following fields:
(id1 int, id2 int, itemsCollection varchar(100), myText TEXT)
I have also sql table, with the following fields: (item varchar(10), rate int)

I need to write a query that returns the following info: id1, id2, itemsCollection, item, rate, myText
The output need to be ordered as:
- Get id1 & id2 with the bigest rate
- output all the recs for the id1 & 2, ordered by rate (sub order)
eg
Main table:
id1 id2 itemsCollection myText
1 1 'a,b' 'count-11-a,B - max = 15 additional txt'
1 1 'a,b' 'count-11-a-B - max = 15'
1 1 '' 'count-11'
1 1 'a,c' 'count-11-a,C - max = 20'
2 8 'c,d' 'count-28-C-d - max = 20 additional txt'
2 8 'c,d' 'count-28-C-d - max = 20'
2 8 'd' 'count-28-D - max = 5'
3 2 'a,d' 'count-32-A-d - max = 10'
3 2 '' 'count-32'

Rates table:
item rate
a 10
b 15
c 20
d 5
'' 0

RequestedOutput:
itemsCollection item rate id1 id2 myText
a,c c 20 1 1 count-11-a,C - max = 20
a,b b 15 1 1 count-11-a,B - max = 15 additional txy
a,b b 15 1 1 count-11-a,B - max = 15
0 1 1 count-11
c,d c 20 2 8 count-28-C-d - max = 20 additional txt
c,d c 20 2 8 count-28-C-d - max = 20
d d 5 2 8 count-28-D - max = 5
a,d a 10 3 2 count-32-A-d - max = 10
0 3 2 count-32
Thanks!you need an application program for that logic

you can sort the results of a join (and in your case the join will be monstrously inefficient, because of the comma-separated list of ids) by descending order of rate, but you can not "take a side trip" and sort all the a/b rows up under the a/b row with the largest rate|||r937, thanks for reply.
No app available - I'm trying to do it using cursor & temp tables, because

Thanks anyway|||okay, then transact-sql is your application programming language

good luck