Is your target format Unicode or non-unicode.

If it is unicode try doing a select into a table with unicode defs in your source db and see if it will convert...

But if it is a phone screen don't answer straight out of the BOL because people can tell 🙂 Also don't bring cheat-sheets into the interview

For more on snapshot isolation

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/tcbchxcb(VS.80).aspx

So my guess is you are not using it. Snapshot isolation can also have a tempdb impact, that is why I asked.

Perhaps you could just bring the data into excel and do the pivot and formatting there. Reporting Services may be a bit much for just one report.

You can also spread Tempdb across multiple physical devices, in some ways treat it like a real busy database and plan it out as such.

Also are you running...

I have done log shipping between 64 and 32 bit, that works just fine.

Are you trying to import the data from a csv and if so does the source have column names?

Do you mean in a cluster, or with log shipping?

You could also fire it with and have it show the actual execution plan, that might give you some insight as well.

Sorry, unlike Oracle, besides for using a unicode datatype you don't have to do anything to be able to use Unicode in SQL Server

In SQL Server 2K5 it is enabled by default. Just keep in mind the storage gets doubled, so a single character takes up two bytes.

Are you running it stand alone in testing? You could just add select getdate() before each call. Or you could add some inserts into a table before each...

You could go with a fixed date way in the future but that would also have some issues.

Also look at isdate() in the BOL. If the value can not be converted to a valid date you are going to have some issues as well.

Henry

When you join with a second table I don't think you can edit in the grid anymore. In general using an update statement is better than...