Hi Grant - I should rephrase my statement - the book has been very helpful and elucidating - just could not correlate this scenario with the book so I needed...

Thanks Gail - as you noted with/without where clause was almost no difference in this case. It seems to be just the volume of data per row.

Although...

Here is the result form the query you sent - thank you

Hi Alan - attached is the actual query plan - looks ok. As noted earlier when I limit the columns required the performance is fine - just select *...

Yes, limited columns gives much better performance

Thank you very much all who have responded !

- data is fun, but gotta learn the rules to make it work for you, or you work for it

Thanks Karen - much appreciated.

I doubt there is just one 'magic bullet' but - this really seems like a market opportunity to build an astute tool that asks...

Thanks Wayne, I am using Brent's tools and some of Ola Hallengren's maintenance solution. The app was not done with much awareness of SQL design methodologies, platform and maintenance...

Thanks Eric

Steve and Grant - thank you both. I much appreciate your guidance and suggestions, I'm sure that I can learn some important things and help my client - and that's...

Thank you - will check on SQLCop.

The system is very messy, lots of Heaps, few indexes, nchars, nvarchar with ansi padding off - should be able to help them....

Hi Grant -

I appreciate your response, and all your knowledge and experience. Maybe I'm short-cutting or lazy here but I was hoping for a shorter solution/crash course(!:w00t:) than reading...

Thanks Steve,

My first instinct was to get them off of non-sequential GUIDs and use Integer identities - but they are both surrogate keys so maybe not much difference other than...

5 years from now...

When I started in this business 35 years ago life was punch-card FORTRAN and Assembler code. I am absolutely amazed at where we are now, and...

The answer should be 20