Great article!

I stumbled across another difference some years ago now, while writing a Crystal Report with the data source being a stored procedure that used a temporary table - Crystal totally fails in this scenario.

The underlying issue here is that if you "SET FMTONLY ON" and call a stored procedure that uses a temporary table, the call will fail (Invalid object name '#temp1234' under SQL2008, message may vary on earlier versions). This is what Crystal does in order to determine the expected schema of the output.

Using a table variable works around this issue nicely.

Cheers,

Nick