My first question is whether Enterprise edition is really needed. There is a large price difference between it and Standard. Unless you just have a pile of spare...

Learn to use the tuning advisor - BUT just don't blindly do whatever it suggests because it will not take into account all the many things going on outside the...

Every time I log in at work the global AD policy sets monitor power-off to disabled. Fortunately, I can override it but pretty much everyone else doesn't bother. ...

Ah, wonderful!!  That did the trick.  I wish I had time to learn more how to operate 2005's etl abilities but alas, busy, busy, busy.

Thanks for the tip!

Your original message is getting old; did you find that the answer is to use the master.dbo.fn_varbintohexstr function?

Thanks both for the help;  After some experiementing, Ten Centuries' method runs a lot slower but it is a LOT easier to read and thus to maintain in the future.

The...

Works perfectly for smaller databases but the variables don't seem to hold GB sized files.  What is the syntax for defining a larger variable type instead of just the default? ...

5 minutes cut down to 1 minute on my test server with less data; No reason not to hope for similar ratio on the production but it has to go wait...

I actually am stuck with std ed.  The 2GB RAM limit is brutal.

I finally figured out a re-write using LEFT JOIN instead of NOT EXISTS and it runs in much less time.  If anyone is interested, here's my proof of concept...

Thanks for the thoughts; I should have mentioned the query.  It doesn't seem poorly written and the plan shows an index seek on every table.  Looks like this (simplified):

Select sales_office_id,...

Well, you beat me to it; everyone should read what the FairTax is about.  Only the most hard core socialists are opposed to it after understanding what is proposed by the FairTax.  Unlike...

"Can someone give me some input on what their indexing strategy is?"

I copy the database to a (nearly) identical test server but without any indexes, clustered or nonclustered.  Then I run...

So, which school do you attend?

An option that needs to be explored is using VMs such as either MS Virtual Server or VMWare.  This would go a long way towards ameliorating the concerns in the article with regards...