Thanks Gail, much appreciated, as usual.

love your avatar, by the way. 🙂

Thanks Gail - that helps.

G-Squared - I see where you're coming from and, if I wasn't normalizing addresses out into CASS certified columns or making first/last name entities (our front-end...

I see where you're coming from and I agree - however, I don't believe that's what the author was talking about. He specifically mentions names and addresses as freeform...

Makes sense. Thanks.

Many thanks, Gail.

argh! Output! That's exactly what I was looking for! Thanks...yeah, I think I'm gonna have to go with the distincts.

Yes, yes, yes, and yes 🙂 The reason I'm considering a refactor is because the step is mind-numbingly slow.

I've been able to establish that our biggest limitation right now...

I have a similar project underway. This is what my environment looks like -

32-core Xeon blade server

192GB RAM

1TB System Partition (internal drive)

20-space 6gbps attached storage in the...

I hate to post a "didja plug it in?!" answer, but seriously - have you tried recreating the OLE DB connection? I've often found that when I get bizarre,...

Sean, that's basically what I'd figured but just wanted to throw it out for the wolves to chew on 🙂

I'm the only one on this server. 😀

here's a stab in the dark - if i know that i started off with a minimum tempdb size and i'm joining all of one table with all of another...

Thanks Ninja's. Yep, tempdb has plenty of room, and I'm keeping an eye on the dest. table, waiting for *anything* to show up.

Yeah, thanks. I was checking dm_exec_requests already and the ETC was 0. There's very little blocking going on, just an occasional IOCOMPLETION wait.