BWAA-HAA-HAA!  This was more of a test of knowledge about Christmas songs than I thought it would be. 😀

Merry Christmas, Steve, and thank you for the early present of seeing you at the Pittsburgh SQL Saturday.  It was a real treat, my ol' friend.

Thank you kindly for the feedback, windchaser... especially after nearly 20 years!  I couldn't believe it.

You've answered you own question.  The tables are, in fact, NOT identical.  You different indexes, which can make the difference between a full table scan (or clustered index scan) and...

I personally don't write code to do imports any more, but I sure used to.

I did pretty much the opposite as what others do.  There were some exceptions, of course,...

I find that a whole lot of people have some really serious problems with smaller data sets.  I been told probably hundreds of times that "performance doesn't matter...

For starters, change this...

DECLARE @cmd NVARCHAR(MAX);

... to this ...

DECLARE @cmd NVARCHAR(4000);

Then see the following for why...

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/system-stored-procedures/xp-cmdshell-transact-sql#arguments

• This reply was modified 10 months, 3 weeks ago by Jeff Moden. Reason: Correct to suggestion. Op used NVARCHAR, not VARCHAR

I find that a whole lot of people have some really serious problems with smaller data sets.  I been told probably hundreds of times that "performance doesn't matter because it...

The OP said "but that session is a background session with a command of "DB Startup" and that he has the logfile being backed up an truncating every hour but...

What type of files are you doing this for?  Plaiu text., CSV, TSV, PDF, what?

You might want to send an email to webmaster@sqlservercentral.com with that question.

I think people have been going a bit nuts for the last 15 or so years and especially in the last 6 or so years.  I just found out about...

Interviewing for open position...

My boss: Rate your SQL skills & knowledge on a scale of 1 to 10.

Interviewee: 7 or 8

Me: Let's talk about backups and restores.

Interviewee: I...

Too much fun, Michael!