In my experience Excel tries to be 'clever' with formatting and presentation.

If it 'recognises' something then it will pre-format.

Usually it gets it right, but sometimes it can mess up your...

The two systems are similar but as you have found not equal 🙂

If you have managed to get a full output of the DDL for the database and code then...

Yes one could delete a big lump at a time, both methods are valid.

Sometimes, simply due to size of data (original post mentions 300m rows) it is more sympathetic to...

Looking at ISNUMERIC()

SELECT ISNUMERIC('1.')

Returns True (or 1)

However

SELECT CAST('1.' AS INT)

Won't cast to an integer

Try

SELECT /*TOP 99 PERCENT*/ cast(cast(DataValue as decimal) as int) as 'CallNo',EventFk

FROM dbo.[EventData] a

INNER JOIN dbo.DataItem b ON a.EventDataId =b.EventDataFk

WHERE b.[EventDataFK] = a.EventDataID

AND DataKey = N'AuditCallRef'

AND DataValue LIKE '%[^0-9]%'

Will show if...

Early thoughts.

Is the command running as the account you think it is?

If you genuinely have sysadmin then CREATE LOGIN shouldn't give permission erros.

It is expected when the FROM clause is fed by a query in brackets that an alias is given.

Even though the X is not explicitly referenced by the rest of...

What is the query you are running?

Without an explicit ORDER BY clause, it is by design that queries are not guaranteed to return data in a set order.

Even (i think)...

A pipe within a column would give simply a column with a pipe in it 🙂

It probably wont be what you want but the db can handle it.

So assuming thats...

Typically wouldnt install on a production box.

VS is a development environment and its results such as ssis packages can be deployed to wherever they need to be from the ide.

However...

Best place to start would be the WMI, counters provided within windows.

Have a root around.

There are loads of Physical Disk performance counters that can be used although they'll report the...

SQL Server Profiler will monitor queries sent to the server.

It can certainly do user name filters, so maybe it will meet your needs.

Seconded for TOAD.

At about £400 notes it's possibly easier to sell to the boss than ERWin.

Couldn't give a genuine comparison of TOAD vs ERWin, however I assume ERWin does something...

Also, there may be a little bit of back-end tweaking that can be done, whilst using views to present the same logical output to the application. Not knowing the structure...

Just a thought, do you drop the indexes prior to a...