@waynes - you're saying if I do the deletion in a loop there will be no locks on the table? Is this better than specifying 'no lock' in...

Thanks for the reference Paul, I'll check it out

Sorry I misread what you said, disregard my previous post...

I can't drop the table because this is to be done on the live database, which constantly has rows being inserted. If dropping the table takes ten minutes I wouldn't...

Thanks for that recompile option suggestion and the batch compilation article, didn't know about that. I sometimes have huge tables that I have to work with as well, but I...

Thanks a lot for your speedy reply! this saves me a lot of time. The only thing I changed was to remove the columnname after the tablename in the from...

I think power users shouldn't have access to the production environment. Most companies have a test environment where queries can be run, so whatever queries the power user has should...

Thanks a lot Craig@Work! I'll be sure to check out the exam codes, a few Amazon books and also the forum here for that.

Nice article.....Interesting that I see this article today because just yesterday I was sitting at my desk and I decided I wanted to do the SQL Server Certification. I started...