Thank you for your reply Sean.

The query is generated by an application, so not much room for change at query level.

You are right in saying that the list is at...

Hello

You could achieve this through osql.

1. Run osql in DOS and extract the last message.

D:\>osql -S INSTANCE -U USER -P PASSWORD -d DATABASE -Q "SELECT * FROM TABLE" | find...

Thank you all for taking the time to reply and for your valuable inputs.

I have managed to reduce the execution to around 6 minutes through the ideas proposed, which is...