David: Thanks for the clarification.

Guys,

It would be great to still find out whether there is a way to force conversions of xml non-friendly characters during xml code generation from...

Guys,

What is the "Numbers" table?

Now to explain what I mean by foreign characters:  It all began when  I tried to convert a database into an xml file.  I used FOR...

Kenneth,

Your solution seems very good.

However, it cannot solve my problem completely as the text column I am working contains a lot of phrases (i.e. not just single letter words).

Otherwise, it...

These are all good ideas.

However, if i don't want to filter out the values  - i want to identify them.  I guess, once filtered out, I can compare 2 tables...

Thanks Ronald.  This is actually a good starting point for me.

One option is to write a function which will just look through the string in a row, char by char,...

Guys,

Thanks for great replies!

Pankaj: I am not totally clear about the purpose of the conversion, as I was just told to do it.  I believe that the goal is to...

We want XML files as a replacement for the current dbs.

I've been told that for what we do here, this should be more efficient.

It is just a few tables and...

Ah ... data general itself is actually pretty trivial http://www.ianywhere.com/developer/product_manuals/sqlanywhere/0901/en/html/dbugen9/00000532.htm

... although I am told that working with xml vs db itself is less efficient

Thanks for the hint

Great.

Could you tell me why you do not like it?  Are there known disadvantages of quering xml data?

Thanks a lot.

Index tuning advisor/wizard is a great tool.  However, as stated by others, it cannot be trusted as is.  Once you received suggestions, a wise move would be to try to identify...

An another website I was suggested to look at the following website, which does have a lot of information on the subject:

http://www.sql-server-performance.com/joe_chang.asp

That is true.  As far as I understand you should.

1. Do you have another dataset to check this (another run of profiler trace)?  If so, check that and see if...

Guys,

I solved the problem.  Basically my db backup took longer today than usual.  While the backup was running, a defragmentation job started, where one of the steps in defragmentation (final...

So this message implies that this "inactive part throw out action" failed, right?

What are the reasons it could fail and negative consequences of the failure?

Thanks a lot

Also, yes, you should add a clustred index to a table.  As far as I know, you should not add it only if you have a good reason not to...