Right. In that case I would...

okey-dokey.

I'll just add that you really should have an experienced DBA or DB developer involved at this point.

I think that this will do it:

[font="Courier New"]SELECT DISTINCT

  w.WOMAN,

  g.GUY

FROM Guys g

  INNER JOIN Women w ON (w.DESIRED = g.CHAR) --has at least one match

--Need more conditions since the above...

From your post 1:

Paul Cresham (6/2/2008)

---

The linked server points at a Progress 4GL database which can be a nightmare to work with, so it may be a Progress issue but...

I know of no reason that they should not work.

Was your error message from Crystal Reports or VB6? Can post the code that caused the error?

Please post the Query plans (as xml-formatted attached files) for the 2-day and 4-day queries.

I agree with the previous poster, the issue isn't the CAST function, which is very fast, the issue is the NText datatype itself, which is slow, cumbersome and inconvenient.

Well 1), yes, SQL Server does reuse SPIDs/Sessions within a Connection by reinitializing them (this is probably what you are seeing),

and 2) you can multiple sessions with the same...

Hah, found it. from BOL, "Shrinking a Database":

Manual Database Shrinking:

...

When using the DBCC SHRINKDATABASE statement, you cannot shrink a whole database to be smaller than its original size. Therefore,...

Is this SQL Server 2005? I thought that that Initial Size limitiation of SHRINKFILE had been removed for 2005?

Yeah, compound error messages can be a problem, though I am not sure if it is TRY..CATCH or EXEC(string) that is eating the inner error message.

I would start with TV re-runs. You can download a lot of them from the internet, if they do...

janine: Except for the +/-1's this is the same logic as mine.

Rajesh, sorry,...