At the archery range

Lounging in bed reading a good book

Playing computer games (I'm replaying starcraft in anticipation of starcraft 2)

Dinner with friends.

To find out what a proc is waiting on, open another query analyser/management studio window and run

SELECT spid, waittime, lastwaittype from master..sysprocesses

You'll have to look through the processes to find...

I would highly recomend that you get the following removed from the mainenance plans.

Remove unused space from database files (shrink db when it grows beyond 50MB, free space after shrink:...

Ah. In that case, I would suggest remove all schemas other than dbo and make sure that all users have the dbo default schema. That should remove any possibility for...

Are you using SQL 2000 or SQL 2005? If you are using 2000, post in the 2000 forums. If you are using 2005, please post in the 2005 forums.

Most of...

Could you pos the proc please?

Things to check - how much space is free in the DB? If it has to grow to accomodate the data, you will get slow...

Dunno about the problem changing the default schema, try using T-SQL rather than the GUI. ALTER USER ...

It is recomended practive to always specify the schema name when refering to...

Indexes can be used for range scans.

If, say, you're always looking for the latest 10 records in the table, an index on the date field is very useful.

This is...

It might be an idea to normalise the table so that you can do equalities, rather than having to use like across a comma delimited list.

I did a comparison a while back, comparing the cast as varchar with the dateadd method for removing a time from a datetime, and the dateadd came in much cheaper...

It seems splitting up the current proc into numerous different queries defeats my original purpose of writing one generic proc in the first place and still no-one has answered the...

Agreed on the wrapper proc.

Recompile can cause serious bottlenecks, not just because of the CPU time to do the compile.

While an object is being compiled, an exclusive lock is...

I'd suggest split into two. One for when the beginning of the name is specified (because it can use an index if there is one on name) and one for...

I'd recomend removing the recompile and rather split the stored proc into two, one that retrieves all candidates, one that retrieves a single one by name.

The problem is that depending...

Two databases, or two tables?

Can you provide the table's structure, some sample data and an example of what you want please