Please folks... make sure you really, really know what you're doing... if you set 'trunc. log on chkpt.' to true, you have a little surprise coming...  try this...

Set the recovery...

Do you mean like this when you say to "ignore if is character data"???

DECLARE @t TABLE( sort varchar(20))

INSERT INTO @t

SELECT '1dd' UNION ALL

SELECT '1x4' UNION...

Sree,

Rather than us guess, do you have some samples of the data before and after the sort you'd like?

It's been "summarized" into the "Recovery Mode".  I believe the "Simple" recovery mode enables it (and SELECT INTO/Bulk Copy, etc).

Personally, I'd hunt down and shoot the bugger that put a Text column in the database in SQL Server 2000.

Also, why the heck...

Ok... confusion has set in, Richard... in your latest post, you say "A large number of the reports do have to be bang up to date" and in a previous...

Turn off auto update of statistics?  Why?  Most folks consider that to be a form of "death by SQL"...

To go along with James Moore's suggestion about creating a temp table of all the dates in the range...

There are a lot of folks that keep an "auxilliary calendar table"...

Just for giggles, monitor the size of the databases, especially TempDB, when this happens.  I'd do a DB Size "profile" right after a reboot to use as a baseline.

The other...

SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL READ UNCOMMITED

I believe I said that...

"Now that I've said all those negative things about them, correctly formed views with the right indexes on the underlying tables can be a...

Like I said....

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/forums/shwmessage.aspx?forumid=9&messageid=350069#bm350229

I sure missed something, there... sorry.  I've not had the same problem with it... lemme dig a little deeper...

Heh, sorry... was having a bit of fun, there.

In al seriousness, the folks that have been saying that an unlimited number of columns is not necessary are all talking from...

I can think of no good reason to do such a thing.

One of the things that a lot of folks don't realize is that most DB's that do a form...