The thing is, no one reads 5 million records. No one reads 5000 records. Very few people read 500. A report should be a succinct display of interesting data, usually...

This is straight out of the books online:

USE AdventureWorks;

GO

DECLARE @MyTableVar table( ScrapReasonID smallint,

...

When and how often to update statistics and reorganize/rebuild indexes is really dependent on your system. You do need to worry about the order of these operations though. I would...

There's no one right answer to this question, but by and large, if you have a general set of data that has to be filled out, then yeah, I'd say...

5 million rows is not a report, that's a data move. Generally reports are much, much smaller.

Since you're using a completely ad hoc mechanism for the query, it's going to...

5 + 2 = 7 not 8... Yeah, that simple math gets away from me sometimes. Sorry about that.

Do both connections have the same settings? You can check this by looking at the connection information in a trace, either existing connections or logins.

I'm not sure how you could do it either, but when you get it done, write it up as an article 'cause I'd love to read it.

Try it WITH ROLLBACK IMMEDIATE

Can you create a graphical execution plan? An actual plan please, not estimated. Save it to a file as .sqlplan and then zip that attach it to a message. If...

It sure sounds like that's what you need. Yes, it's running on the server, but so is your database. You just point the scheduler at the DB you want and...

One thing worth noting, those costs are estimates, even in the actual execution plan. They can accurately portray which parts of the query are most costly, but not necessarily. For...

The jobs are created in the SQL Server Agent. It's a seperate service that runs along side SQL Server (assuming you're not running Express). It allows for scheduling to run...

If you use the 2000 and the 5000 field together, you're going to get warnings and potentially errors because you'll exceed the page length limit. MAX bypasses that issue. I'd...

I suspect using OPEN TABLE is the issue. If you go out & bounce around in Google, there are a lot of people experiencing problems with it. I couldn't find...