I have a (somewhat) similar situation to that several others have described.

In my production environment, I have an 80GB DB file. Throughout the course of the week, a 5GB...

Any updates/changes for SQL 2008? Also, another request for a link to the "Advanced" article, if it was ever written.

Thanks!

In my case, I creates a stored procedure that runs a simple query against the other database (select count(*) from a table), returning the result set. I can run...

I am having a similar problem, and I think I know why - it's just that none of the documentation, nor anything I've found on the 'net, indicates that this...

Please keep in mind - I believe that the original article was looking at SQL Server 2000. It's always possible that better options are available under 2005, or that...

Umm, you might want to change your description. The COALESCE function built into SQL Server does not create a concatenated string out of a list of values. From...

Oh - and thanks to all who responded, and especially to Vladan, whose tip resolved my issue!

Parameter Sniffing, huh? Well, you learn something new every day!

Yes, I had taken the parameters for the stored procedure and declared them as variables when I ran this as...

SQL does provide some assistance as to what is erroring out, and why.

Given the topic, I probably already wrote something about this routine some time ago. However, this is...

Ron says:

"Since I tend to avoid cursors I cannot vouch for the contention that "adding LOCAL STATIC to a cursor declaration will produce the kind of performance increases that a...

It's important to remember to balance the cost of the time to run a routine versus the cost of the time to develop the routine.

If there's something you only expect...

As others have mentioned, STATIC or LOCAL STATIC cursors resolve much of the performance issues seen with cursors.

I did once see an indication that non-STATIC cursors behave in a significantly...

sp_helptext is a procedure that returns a dataset containing one row for each line in the original procedure declaration.

If you do something like this, you can capture that output in...

Note that, on a table with a clustered index, you'll never do a table scan. If you're using the index, you'll do a clustered index seek; if not, a...

Oops - sorry, I missed the TextPad note in your original post.

Unix systems have the 'head' and 'tail' commands that would let you grab chunks of the file to investigate....