DBREINDEX is useful for regular maintenance, but as you're finding out it can be a very long process for a large table that is heavily fragmented.

The equivalent to the Oracle...

Using LIKE is forcing it to convert all the datetime fields to strings, but not necessarily in the same format as your @year_month parameter, so none of the records match...

Maybe you've got char(10)+char(13) instead, or some other goofy combination.  You could take a look at the characters before and after the linefeed with something like this:

SELECT

pub_id

I would be tempted to use DTS, or maybe script a series of BCP OUT and TRUNCATE TABLE/BCP IN commands.  I even thought of snapshot replication, where you could create...

Here is what I found in Books Online that said you could do a partial restore to a different location.  It doesn't say you'll get a complete working database, it...

If you put the queries I posted above, especially the second one, into an Excel spreadsheet and turn it into a pivot table, it looks very impressive.  Just the thing...

That sounds exactly like what I said would happen. 

Partial restore into an existing database makes the unrestored parts of the database unusable.  You would only do this in extreme...

The REPLACE function will work if you use SUBSTRING to get the text data, or if you cast to varchar(max) as Aaron suggested.

SELECT

REPLACE