Last time I looked changing the DB Collation didn't change the collation on the individual columns. This is a bit more tricky/risky. Has this changed in SQL2005.

This also doesn't resolve...

DTS? SSIS? - NO WAY. This is a once off and it also involves making changes to stored procs and some user defined data types to make them 2005 compatable....

Log shipping won't allow me to change the collation.

Thanks for the reply.

As I mentioned we are also changing the collation, so we can't just restore and logship. So I create the new ,empty database from scripts. I...

Surely the set d.ItemNumber = o.ItemNumber isn't needed as the "join" is on OrderNumber and ItemNumber:

MERGE OrderDetails AS d

   48 USING OrderInfo AS o

   49 ON (d.OrderNumber = o.OrderNumber AND d.ItemNumber =...

It would be interesting to see the query plans for the last two options and see how they compare. Logically we would expect the performance to be better on these...

I would be seriously concerned if any of my SQL installations generated 260GB of log files. Are you doing full logging? And what sort of errors are you seeing in...

I've just finished a(nother) SQL course and this exact senario was discussed with both of these solutions proposed. i.e. using WITH RECOMPILE or using an itermediate SP to decide which final...