Thanks very much Steve!

I'll give this a try ASAP.

At least I know what they're called now! When I had initially come across this subject in my docs, they didn't seem to...

Yes those numbers will be inaccurate since they will only reflect what the index thinks is in the table.

If you rebuild index statistics just before you run the above query,...

Wow!

Thanks Steve.  That Olap Scribe tool is pretty awesome.  That will serve my purposes perfectly.

As for the XML in the repository, I had a *very quick look*  into the mdb...

Start small in an entry level position, like help desk or operations, and then slowly steer the job to your area of interest. If on the help desk, offer...

here's the one I use to find any string in any SP or VIEW.

Change the word 'PROC' below to 'VIEW' if you want to search views instead

select s.name, c.*...

changing from clustered to non-clustered and moving the PK to the last drop really helped performance..

from 20 mins to 1 min.

thanks

aha!

Yes the PK is clustered..and on investigation I don't think it's a good candidate for it. I'll consider the non clustered approach for this key.

Also, it was the first...

Good info in there Greg, Bill.

Now my twist.

Destination = brand new W2k machine running SQL200

Source = old Nt4 machine running SQL7

Source DB = 140 GB

Lots of DTS pkgs

Lots of Agent...

Thanks everybody!

These are all great tips.

Yes, we have a RAID set up but its configuration is out of my control. I'm hoping it's optimized.

I'll do some experimenting with the...

DBCC OUTPUTBUFFER ( spid )

will give you a dump of the process's output buffer, i.e. the stuff that hasn't been printed to screen yet.

The format is not...