Thanks Koen! You were right, it needed to be an ADO connection; the explicit casting turned out not to be needed. Below is what I ended up with....

Thanks Koen. Would you be able to help me understand how to do that? I tried one approach (ExecuteScalar()) and gave up on it, now trying something else...

Jason,

Thanks for the response. No, there are no recommended indexes shown when I display the execution plan.

As I said, I also have an index on RowNum that includes all...

Hi,

I think one problem is you forgot to say 'set'...

For example, this:

BEGIN

@statusID = 3

END

...should be this:

BEGIN

SET @statusID = 3

END

I forgot to mention... I also have an index on RowNum that includes all the fields I am selecting; with or without the index hint my query is 1. getting...

Thanks Gail and Jeff. I've read the articles which seem like a good start - I feel a little more confident now to experiment. (Btw Jeff I did mean...

Thanks Jeff.

From the looks of it I think there are a lot of other things I should learn before partitioning.

Do you think that if I know I will...

Maybe filtered indexes would be smarter? (I was reading this among other articles...http://www.sqlservercentral.com/blogs/practicalsqldba/2013/04/08/sql-server-part-9-filtered-index-a-new-way-for-performance-improvemnt/)

I could create a filtered index for each account category or even each account sub-category....

Thanks!!

In trying to understand this a bit better, I googled for 'primary key clustered' vs 'unique key clustered' ... if I understand correctly the unique key will NOT prevent a...

As info I looked at the list of dependencies and there are dozens and dozens of views that point to these tables (the account table I've asked about is one...

ChrisM@Work (8/20/2013)

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A primary key doesn’t have to be indexed, although SQL Server will create a unique clustered index on a PK by default; likewise, the clustered index doesn’t have to...

Most of the queries will include the field in question, but will never join on the field in question. It will almost always be 80 or so characters but...

After Jeff got me thinking, I ended up not needing very long strings after all so went with much shorter varchar's.

One thing I observed that was interesting...

When using SSIS to...

Hi Jeff,

Thanks for the words of encouragement. I've been getting the SSC newsletter for awhile now and quietly helping myself to some of the articles therein. So, well...