Generally, it's probably safer to create the index & temp table together and then add data to it. Clearly it's affecting the locking, but it will also cause recompiles.

SQL Server takes exclusive locks on a row, page or data when it wants to perform a write operation. You've got a process within your stored procedure that is escalating...

It looks like you may be hitting a bug. I found this kb article that seems to describe your situation:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/935356

"In SQL Server 2005, assertion error 3624 may occur. The...

Good catch. Once I spotted that USING word I couldn't see much else.

Forgive us our typos as we forgive those who typo against us... unless you just ran a restore on the production server...

Cool. What would you use in 2005?

Are you running this against a 2000 server or against a 2005 server in 8.0 compatibility mode? Either of those will be the problem.

One likely issue is the USING word you've got in the very first join. Also, you can't use variables $x. Instead you should use @x. What are those other two...

No, you and the article are correct. Seeks are better than scans. Eliminating, as much as you can, bookmark lookups is the way to go. The issue isn't whether or not...

The differences in the data are most likely going to cause different query plans. I suspect that's the most likely issue.

One thing you said that concerns me a bit. You've created...

Is the amount of data and it's distribution the same between dev & production. Do you have the latest statistics in both environments? Do you have an index maintenance plan in both...

There are some tools that offer a solution to this problem too. You can try Red-Gate's SQL Refactor which will rename an object and all it's references. Another one is...

I've only spent five minutes looking at this, but the first two things I'd check would be the parallelism threshold on your server and the cluster on the Subscriber table.

I'd...

sp_addextendedproperty is for putting descriptions, etc., on to your SQL server objects. It doesn't do any kind of formatting of any kind. It's for creating meta-data about your database objects....

And get a copy of Inside SQL Server 2005: The Storage Engine by Kalen Delaney