you can use ram for tempdb
look at http://www.superspeed.com/servers/ramdisk.php

Based on your current setup I would get more RAM on the server and use part of it for the...

just text added to it as to ensure the code I was doing was picking up the correct values only, and not empty spaces afterwards

Just a bit of an exercise to show what can be done, and some of the possible issues if the date format isn't always the same

declare @tbl...

Glad it worked.

Just as an additional check as it may also affect this (and other) queries, how many CPU's you got allocated to this VM and how many...

the code I gave does guarantee that.
but if you wish to have the extra validation you can try this variation to the code I gave

[code...

without a full rewrite I would try the following
looking at the code and the plans the following is not quite what I would do and I do think it...

Really really depends on the volumes you are going to be loading, how many times you need to do it and on the whole infrastructure you have to play with.

Looks like normal issues with loading onto cluster indexes.

As the table is partitioned the fastest way would be to populate staging tables per partition and then using the...

as an advise whenever doing this type of conversions always select the individual parts on their own to see what the resulting value is.

SELECT SUM(vol)
FROM TABLE