You may have defined the problem wrong. Did you mean to ask this, instead? :

'How can I detect that a string has nothing but whitespace?'

Replace space, newline and carriage-return...

I'm just quoting pages, which say you need SSIS installed, and may need Service Pack 1. But if the problem still occurs, consider the adding to feedback issue report mentioned...

What is your primary key?

Which column are you using to select a row? Can't you make sure your next select gets a different row? Using a date value seems...

I'm no expert here, but here are some ideas:

1) Measure actual I/O. (I rarely can seem to read query plans...)

2) Try iteratively simplifying the query in steps until it's faster....

This might work, if xp_cmdshell is enabled.

exec master.dbo.xp_cmdshell('rasdial entryname')

WAITFOR DELAY '00:03:00'

exec master.dbo.xp_cmdshell('rasdial entryname /disconnect')

Another way would be to write an XP in C which calls RasDial. Like this:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;Q171366&

This looks...

I thought I'd offer some comments, though they may be obvious.

If using EE, or SQL 2005, make sure that either the /3gb switch is in boot.ini, or AWE is enabled,...

I like the anyQuery script, Frederik, but here's a script with results more like the original.

'http://www.sqlservercentral.com/columnists/rcarlson/scriptedserversnapshot.asp

Dim srvname

If WScript.Arguments.count > 0 Then

 srvname = WScript.Arguments(0)

Else

 srvname = InputBox ( "Enter the server Name",...

If you only want one or two values from the row, you can concatenate them before doing MAX, then extract them back out with SUBSTRING. This often requires converting some...

standard advice: check indexes and triggers.

Large clustered indexes are to be avoided. (I just greatly increased the speed of inserts on my database by reducing my clustered index to one...

If SQL 2005, I think you could create a custom aggregator in the CLR which concatenates strings together, then use a GROUP BY with your new aggregator to do the...

I thought of converting to and from XML, but wasn't sure that was easy to do. Note that xml element names are case-sensitive (at first I was creating the document...

CHECKSUM and BINARY_CHECKSUM are very poor hashes. Don't be surprised if you find almost 1% collisions. But as long as you don't rely on them for uniqueness, they can help...

Although I could imagine a procedure that builds dynamic SQL to execute a query, output its results to a temp table, then iterate over the columns of the result to...

MS advises against compression. SQL 2005 beta2 won't install in a compressed partition. I heard/read that the algorithms for writing pages aren't designed to be safe for compressed volumes, for...

If the volume of searches is small, you could update a hitcount in each record after it is found. But I would consider instead logging the data on which items...