My opinion is if either side is misleading there are ethical issues. If a consultant makes it clear that they are weak in an area but will give a...

I am curious about how you are determining they are system procedures also.

The results returned by the two statements below will NOT return system procedures.

USE MASTER

GO

SELECT * FROM...

I think you misunderstood the comments about it being homework. EVERYONE here is doing this because they apparenly like helping 🙂 But when it is obviously a learning...

This is one of the reasons I was asking about FK issues.

http://sqlblogcasts.com/blogs/tonyrogerson/archive/2007/03/30/blocking-from-foreign-key-constraint-look-ups-clustered-blocks-v-heap-doesn-t-block.aspx

Ok. Those are pretty good write performance numbers (could be better, but are definately better than your times showed). I had a similar process that after extensive testing...

What about your disk write bytes/sec. You had mentioned that the queue is backing up. I am interested in raw numbers for the moment. I am trying...

That would push us back to the I/O performance of you system. Have you done any tests with I/O Meter? Or using perfmeter checked to see your peak...

Even better would be bcp.exe and bulk import

Lots of cursors here too. I would be very surprised if you aren't getting blocking issues while stepping through the cursors.

I might suggest going with temp tables...

Also, you have a 4G DB with 1G of RAM. How big are the tables? Profile the job to see where it is slowing down. I expect...

Sorry can't pass this up "5" 😀

...

The delete is fine. Changing it to just a detach unless you click a check box or say something similar to Oracle "Including datafiles" is Ok with me too....

I doubt that is what the OP wants. That assumes that the first day of the month is always the first day of the week. Is that what...

Disk storage pool which automatically get's pushed to tape using Backup Exec. Best of both worlds.

However, whatever solution gives you the most reliable backups is what you should use....

Don't misunderstand me. I don't EVER encourage hints. There is almost always a better way, however there are some cases where the optimizer for some reason or another...