Job schedule was created on October 24, i.e. 3 days before it was scheduled to run.

There are no jobs/schedules on the server with identical job/schedule names/IDs.

Thanks everyone for your help.

Of course I have been using WITH (TABLOCK) on both target and source tables.

As for converting text to something else - I need nvarchar(MAX) to allow...

I cannot use SELECT..INTO, because the target table has to be created on specific filegroups, including one for textimage. I create a table beforehand.

Target table is created before populating. Of course, it's a heap without any indexes at all - they are created only after populating is finished.

Seems like you are right, Ian. After cleaning the cache, the speed is low again.

However, this is weird. By default, BCP is supposed to be fast even if the source...

Only I would use GetDate() for LogDate. So, it would seems like the following:

CREATE TRIGGER tr1 ON Transactions

AFTER INSERT,UPDATE AS

INSERT INTO TransactionLog(TransactionID, TransactionStatusCode, LogDate, ErrorCode, Comments )

SELECT TransactionID, TransactionStatusCode, GetDate(),...