JV,

Have you ever used SSIS before?  What about DTS?  If you've never used either, I recommend getting an SSIS book.  If you've used DTS but not SSIS, you might be...

You know, it occurs to me that you might be heading in the wrong direction.  Especially as some of your row results turn out to be column headers, but the...

First, do you have FULL Text Indexing set up on your SQL Server?

The CONTAINS keyword only works with that.  Same as FREETEXT, CONTAINSTABLE and FREETEXTTABLE.

Secondly, you have to code your...

Have you checked out the new PIVOT operator in Books Online?

I'm just learning it myself, so I can't give you a lot of information.  Though I'm not sure you can...

Paul,

Well, I'm good and stumped here.  The only thing I can think of is that maybe there's a hidden newline character somewhere in the date field, but I'm not...

Steve,

Maybe they are just using it in a colloquial sense, but there are a lot of people who would take the word "Snapshot" literally.  So I decided just to stick...

I don't recommend a snapshot, actually.  If the Developers are going to be constantly developing against a DB, a better practice would be to do a nightly restore of production...

Ariadne,

Remember also, that if you automate your backups via the Litespeed Enterprise console, it can self verify without you having to "wait until it's done" and running that extended sproc.

Actually, there's sound reason to move your SQL Server install to another drive.  If you have multiple drives, put your OS on the C: drive and then the SQL Server...

DateTime collation issues shouldn't affect a character field, so it's a little strange to me...

What's the code you're using for the Bulk Insert?  What delimiters are being used in the...

Paul,

What size is the character field you're using in your staging table?  You don't mention that.

Also, if it's importing as a character field, but syntax erroring on the Convert, you...

Andras,

Thanks for clarifying my link issues.  I thought you were talking TechNet, not BOL. @=)

You know, I already knew all this extended property stuff.  I guess I just didn't realize...

So, basically I'm correct in thinking that if I don't need to return results as one row XML (FOR XML RAW without the Elements keyword), that there's really no reason...

I've never actually had a bully boss myself.  I had a paranoid micro-managing boss once, and a strict / insensitive boss another time, but never one that was an actual bully. ...

Paul, check the collation on your server OS and on your SQL Server.  The column itself might be collated differently than the other collations or your database / server collation...