Thanks Dan. I have not had enough time to implement and test this suggestion . . but I will soon.

I did not realise that to lock a col it...

Thanks for your suggestions Dan. Andy's suggestions are not really constructive... slowing down the sp is not an option (we already have timeouts occurring), and of course the app...

C'mon guys. You can do better than that. Perhaps you misunderstood? I'll rephrase.

If I use a script for making changes to all db's (using cursor of sysdatabases),...

Yes, I had planned to use a 'load on demand' type approach. The number of levels I load initially would depend upon volume of data. Remainder loaded as...

Much faster than EM.

Also Query Analyser gets blocked by EM if it is currently in the midst of dropping down the list (quite annoying!).

Its looking like I may...

PS. Above is slow in EM on server itself. I thought hardware insufficient as they have up to 100 concurrent users (off an intranet app).

'Auto Close' did not really help issue.

Master is included in standard maintenance job.

Any other ideas??

Thanks - 'Auto Close' was set to true. I'll let you know if the speed is improved.

Ignore my problem above -

I found that it was the DRIDefault that I had set for the column. This must be removed before the column is removed.