As always : it depends.

.Net will definitely go for disconnected data with closed connections. Because of connection pooling, the overhead for having a "new" connection is minimised.

Same goes for others....

Also please do check : "Is the Schema Still Needed?" http://www.sqlservercentral.com/forums/shwmessage.aspx?forumid=32&messageid=11677 and the comments on it.

these jobs, running on SQL7sp2 with NT-4 sp6a, log  an error-eventlog when they fail.

Since the server has been replaces by a  SQLserver2ksp3a on W2Ksp4 it only logs warnings.

Check this thread. It handles the same "issue" :

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/forums/shwmessage.aspx?forumid=6&messageid=96649

In your select statement you can use case when ACCT_NO LIKE '%|' then REPLACE(ACCT_NO,'|','~') else ACCT_NO end.

sp_who / sp_who2 might help to determine who blocks.

If you haven en open EM connection to the db and an open connection to the db using QA, there are 2...

this is a long shot, but maybe SOUNDEX may help you (language dependent). Check BOL

maybe those servers tcp\ip settings are being set to hide from the network ?

(EM\server-properties\network config\tcp-ip)

- Which timeout has been set by the application ?

   (and which do you use with QA)

- This is a result of an ADO-recordset.

          Why use a recordset...

adding to Steve's solution.

To avoid this, make this current user member of db_owners group and make an other user db owner (sp_changedbowner @loginame = 'yyy' ,@map = 'true'

). This way...

connection pooling

this will keep the connection alive for a while (default 60sec ?) because apparently building a connection taks a lot of resources....

EdVassie points to the right direction.

Here's more :

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/columnists/sjones/wheredoiwanttogotodayrichdatatypes.asp

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/columnists/lsmith/storingandretrievingbinarydatainsqlserver.asp

http://www.sql-server-performance.com/asp_sql_server.asp

http://www.sql-server-performance.com/q&a17.asp

http://www.sqlteam.com/item.asp?ItemID=986

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/periodic/period98/image.htm

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/periodic/period98/asp98b1.htm

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/partbook/asp/binarydata.htm

I hope this gets you on track :

SELECT country_code

, sum(case when datepart(ww,TsCrea) = datepart(ww,dateadd(ww,-13,getdate())) then 1 else 0 end) as count_13

, sum(case when datepart(ww,TsCrea) = datepart(ww,dateadd(ww,-12,getdate())) then 1 else 0...

in addition to the other replies:

- If you know you'll need 13,5 Gb why do you try to shrink to 4 Gb ?

  This way sqlserver will have to allocate...

an other 2ct.

The best things about nulls is you don't need to use them.

So only define null alowed when you need null, when it makes sence for your datamodel...