There are a lot of unknowns here, and some of it depends on what tools you have at your disposal. I would personally build an SSIS package to move the...

Thanks for the info. I'll definitely go back and batch this op.

Thanks, Grant. Explaining it as "whatever the smallest integer type it can fit into" gets to the core of what I was asking. Thanks.

FWIW, the reason I asked was that...

That's exactly what I needed. Thanks!

Thanks all, I got some good ideas and new information from the various posts here.

Anyway, What I ended up doing was first run a script to pull the smaller reference...

Interesting. I guess I've never come across a place where I saw an nolock being used on a DML statement (I didn't even think it was possible). Thanks for the...

I am basing this assumption off the agregate of several articles on MSDN, Stack overflow and SSC

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic344649-149-1.aspx

https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/en-US/fbc52b71-a084-4315-9bb5-ebcb8e745c0a/with-nolock-across-a-linked-server?forum=sqldatabaseengine

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9268438/cannot-specify-an-index-or-locking-hint-for-a-remote-data-source-sql-server-2005

plus the article in my OP.

I could be...

How, hypothetically would database corruption arise from using nolock?

Thanks Matt, now that I think about it, that's probably the right direction to go. That in conjunction with the possibility of setting up nolock'd views is probably enough to...

Ill play around with that; thanks. Do you know if theres any way to do it all from one server? its not a huge pain but in a perfect world...

No. I'm fully aware of all the implications of NOLOCK and the possibility of dirty reads....

Thanks, all! This gave me some useful insight into where that sentiment was coming from.

Unfortunately I don't know the answer then. This forum is specifically for SQL Server, not Oracle, so you might have better luck on an Oracle forum.

What do you mean "remove the double quote from the script"? Also to_char() is an oracle function IIRC. Are you asking what the SQL Server equivalent is?

I know this is a super old thread, but it was extremely helpful in a problem I had at work. Thanks!!