Thanks for posting that - can you also please post the "CREATE TABLE" statements for the tables involved? I appreciate that you cannot supply all of the sample data...

Note that the query engine, when creating a plan, takes into account things such as table statistics, etc. If you are checking your query in a small development environment...

Hmmm. So far SQL 2005 isn't that far behind SQL 2000 in terms of service packs issued per year.

It'd be nice to see the cumulative update pack 6 more...

There is absolutely no performance advantage to be gained from having a unique index on only your primary key column(s).

The only case where it could help is where you had...

You should index the foreign key constraint column.

In Query Analyzer, before you execute your query, press Ctrl+K. This will turn on showing the execution plan. Then, once you...

The reason I don't / can't use all the new bits (CTEs would be nice for readability in some of my code) is that not all customers can just switch...

Find something that someone will find useful in your company. Have a small target to hit - maybe just stock movements by month or something. When someone in...

The "alter table" within the exec statement idea is a good one that I hadn't thought of before 🙂

One place where I've abused this practice is where we have MS...

You could keep SQL profiler open to see what statements are being executed. Also perhaps use performance monitor to keep things such as number of transactions open, etc. ...

Poor wireless signal will do this to you.

The 1000 rows - do they have text, image, ntext, varchar(max), varbinary(max), etc fields?

Try connecting to the other server using

np:[SERVERNAME]

or

tcp:[SERVERNAME]

where [SERVERNAME] is the...

What tool are you using to present the data? I would suggest you look at either

1. MS Excel pivot tables

2. Crystal Reports - Crosstab

3. SQL Server Reporting Services -...

This is something that you should definitely do in the presentation layer. You're pretty much making extra columns in your resultset which the presentation layer than happens to present...

And of course many of us inherit code that may contain cursors. Unless you understand cursors you may not be able to translate it into a nicer set-based syntax.

I...

You can use SQL Server Enterprise Manager to right-click on tempdb and change its starting size.

As Matt suggested, break your transactions into smaller chunks. If you are using simple...

I'd try giving SSIS a go