When you're testing, take a look at the estimated rows for the actual values and the variables. I suspect you'll see substantial differences. For the variables you'll see an average...

Grant Fritchey (6/10/2009)

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Lynn Pettis (6/10/2009)

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MarkusB (6/10/2009)

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Grant Fritchey (6/10/2009)

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I can't read minds, but I can see the future...

I see... I see... a dba-wanna-be...

Lynn Pettis (6/10/2009)

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MarkusB (6/10/2009)

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Grant Fritchey (6/10/2009)

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I can't read minds, but I can see the future...

I see... I see... a dba-wanna-be on the...

WayneS (6/10/2009)

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I wrote the article in Word, and I had asked Steve to include it...

Grumpy DBA (6/10/2009)

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I use one of the names people call me, some of the others are not printable under the current decency laws.

Developer 1: "Hey, it's almost quitting...

Actually, based on what you describe, I'm not sure I'd use SSIS to do the job. I think I'd drop out to PowerShell to manage this. If you do it...

Yes, getting that many updates into a single statement is the best mechanism. You should experiment between using XQuery directly on the XML and loading the data into a temporary...

Percentage costs are based on the estimated costs and as Christopher pointed out, estimated costs are just that, estimated. They're based on the statistics available to the optimizer and are...

sys.dm_tran_locks is going to have the locking information, although I'm not sure if it will show lock escalation as it occurs. Once you're in there, you can get the sessionID...

When in doubt about thing released by Microsoft, the best source is Microsoft. You can go to the MSDN web site. Finding "What's New in SQL Server 2005 SP3" will...

It sounds like parameter sniffing (do a search on that phrase for volumes of information).

But, statements like this in your WHERE clause

abs(abs(a.value)-abs(b.value)) >= @threshold

Are going to prevent index use in...

The very nature of SQL Server is try to make it possible for lots of people to read the same data at the same time. Reading data, not updating/deleting it,...

There used to be several tools available for reading log files. I know that Idera had one as did Red Gate. I'm pretty sure Red Gate's is gone. I'm not...

Yeah, it was the number of plan guides that you'd need that made me balk. You can create a plan guide for an ad hoc query, but any variation in...

Well done. Extremely thorough, accurate, well written... but what's with the attached Word file?