I'm not sure why you're getting the collation errors. One of the columns must be marked differently. How about this as a query:

select p.name

...

That's elapsed time on the client then. Have you looked at the execution plans?

Sorry, I didn't read the whole post (again).

That is odd. Where are you measuring the time elapsed, the server or the client?

Have you looked at the execution plan? Maybe most...

Probably because most of the time is spent in martialing the rows of data, not particular columns.

The problem with dynamic queries is that they can lead to recompiles and poor plan reuse. While they solve some problems, they can introduce others.

Imke Cronje (1/28/2008)

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Am busy running DBCC ShowContig at the moment. Taking quite long.

Checked out execution plan and its shows this:

Query Cost (relative to batch) : 100%

Estimated Operator Cost: 99...

Basically the case statement is resolving either to 1 or 0. If it's 1, then 1=1 at the end of the case statement. If it's zero, then 0 certainly does...

And the execution plan?

Plus, how often does the index get rebuilt or the statistics get updated?

Further, since as you say this isn't your database, if the owner has set up security appropriately, you probably won't have DDL permissions.

Everything everyone else said is 100% true. Just understand that if you don't need case sensitivity, using it just to be cool can add an incredible amount of overhead to...

Designing web pages & managing databases are two different beasties. But since you ask, I have all of the Inside SQL Server 2005 series sitting on my desk, well thumbed...

We've actually got a method that does this pretty well. We try to use it sparingly, but some of our reports from some of our systems have legitimate requirements to...

And be sure to check the execution plan to be sure that indexes are being used at all.

Even if you don't explicitly state a return value, all stored procedures have one. I prefer to do something along these lines in 2005 (similar, but different error handling, in...

As the size of the database increases, sp_updatestats can degrade pretty seriously. You may need to identify those particular tables or indexes that need more frequent updates and use UPDATE...