There is nothing I hate worse than googling a question and finding the place I posted it to as the first response. It never bodes well for getting a good...

The parameter sniffing is pretty likely. You might also have different ANSI settings from your different connections. That's worth checking as well.

Unless you've got a very good reason not to, you should make sure there is a clustered index on the table. It's really hard to tell you which column not...

The common language runtime (CLR) comes with SQL Server 2008 and can be enabled. No extra installs for .NET are necessary.

Is that what you were looking for?

You can see this in the Books Online:

INSERT INTO schema.table (columnlist)

SELECT ...

FROM ...

WHERE ....

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...