I wouldn't be surprised if it was a Java or C# batch job running at that time   SQL Scheduled Jobs aren't the only show...

Thanks for the awesome compliment, Kenny... and thanks for the patch to the code!

Yeah... Sorry about that... was thinking about something different and didn't double check.

Whatever... I've been working with SQL Server for 12 years and I've never had to write a cursor.  Yeah, sometimes the occasional While loop in a function (have even gotten...

Thanks, Edward.  Take a look at the above, if you want.

For those that want to play...  

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--      Generate an 8 million row test file. This is NOT part of the solution.  It is...

Heh... I once had a friend that tried to make bottles from broken glass.  That didn't work out so well, either

Thanks for the feedback, Lowell

One more thing... you said the article explains how to save each "field" as SMALLINT.  Even that is...

You didn't answer my other question... are the dashes supposed to be delimiters?

Heh... some of the best (and worst) ideas are spawned on cocktail napkins... this one happens to be one of the worst... if you run it more than once, it...

I only had the chance to work with 2k5 once, so far, but I did notice other strange (different) default settings... for example, "Concatenate Null Yields Null" was turned off...

The object of the FROM clause may not be a variable.  You'll need to use dynamic SQL to do this.

You sure it was 2,147,483,647 MB?  That's two billion mega bytes... no wonder the server was having a hard time swallowing that

East Indian, American, or other, I'd really like to see 3rd party vendors adopt the strategy of doing things right.  Not just software, either... call centers of all sorts should...