Selecting from a table is different than selecting from a view and they shouldn't really be compared. Selecting from a view is basically selecting from a query that selects from...

I haven't heard that term before either.

We have implicit and explicit data conversions... Not helpful, but at least those words are used. An implicit procedure would be one that occurs...

We currently have two processes, both effectively the same. One of them we use an in-house developed tool that generates scripts based on a manifest of changes. We basically just...

From the error and your description, do you have some type of constraint on the column or table that prevents non-printing characters or something? Simply storing a carriage return is...

What error are you getting? Your test function ran fine on my machine.

When you say 2 million rows, do you mean, per year or total. If total, I wouldn't sweat migrating the data out of that table assuming you've got good indexes...

For that matter, if you right click a table in SSMS & use Script, Select, you can get a basic SELECT script for the table with all columns listed.

2008 will...

First, the problem that you're running into now.

If you have code that expects 15 columns, but suddenly gets 16, it may not know what to do with it and will...

There's no way to teach SSIS within a post on a newsgroup. However, I can point you to a few articles available on the site that should get you started.

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/introductiontodtsinsqlserver2005/1486/

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/SQL+Server+2005+-+SSIS/thenewetlparadigm/1719/

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/SQL+Server+2005+-+SSIS/upgradingsqlserver2000dtspackagestossis/2201/

Here's...

One other thing you might check is running Profiler and getting statement complete events. This puts a significant load on the server, but you'd see the actual cost of each...

Text data is just strings as far as SQL Server is concerned and UPPER is not any kind of data limit, but rather a format. You can probably use an...

Use this code to create the linked server (the example is for connecting to Oracle):

EXEC master.dbo.sp_addlinkedserver @server = N'ServerName', @srvproduct=N'MSDAORA', @provider=N'MSDAORA', @datasrc=N'connectstring'

Then your TSQL just needs to include the server...

You should look at Integration Services. This is the primary Extract Transform & Load (ETL) tool for SQL Server. It can open a large variety of data types and move...

Excellent. Now you just need to look into those two clustered index scans to see if you can improve the performance even more. Look at your table and the predicates...

Without structure & data, it'll be really hard to say.

Do you have the execution plan? Can you post the estimated plan for the full query that takes too long to...