Hi

What I usually do if I'm not sure how to do something in QA is to do what I want to do in EM in a test database and record...

Yes, I believe that if you import a text file into Excel, it samples the first x rows to make a best guess at the data type. In your case...

what version of SQL Server are you using?

Right-click server and select properties

Again, depending on how much time (and disk space), you could bcp the data out in native format, drop the table, recreate the table, reload the data and rebuild the...

Couldn't you script them out and find and replace in QA?

Are your indexes badly fragmented? If so, you could try rebuilding them. This should save you some space.

How do you break the query down into compile time and execution time?

Thanks Andy

I was being lazy really, didn't fancy reinventing the wheel if anybody else had already got a script! I think sp_help_job will also help me.

and you can also say how you want your columns delimited (,|tab etc)

What are the criteria SQL Server uses when deciding to auto update statistics? And, what sample does it use - presumable not 100%?

Andy

Do you have any database maintenance plans set up that check database integrity? I can't remember the exact details, but there may be a problem here where this plan puts...

mccork

Thanks very much for this, its solved my problem.

Andy

The database is in SIMPLE recovery mode, so the TL shouldn't grow too much

Thanks for the useful input so far.

Table is currently 980,229,298 rows and approaching 250GB in size (data & indexes).

I tried DBCC INDEXDEFRAG abandoned after 20 hours. DBCC DBREINDEX ran out...

Frank

The indexes were dropped via QA. The PK constraint was dropped via EM.

Thanks

Andy