Also, by placing the hugeDerivedTable into a temptable, you won't have to repeat the expression for it, which I seriously think would be very difficult to avoid otherwise, since the...

As others have said, sysindexes is for approximation only, it is not guaranteed to show the exact number of rows at any given time.

If your process requires that you find...

Exactly what is it that you want to avoid? Could you expand on your particular issue?

Technically, you can't avoid specifying the remote servername in any case - openrowset or openquery...

I'm a little curious to the flow of assignment of invoices..

Step 3 -- Assign invoice number to each line of result set (multiple lines per invoice)

Step 4...

No problems Frank. Be my guest

/Kenneth

In order to be 'complete' about the networkaddress, you also need to know the subnetmask associated to the particular ip address.

Here's a quickie using ipconfig to get both those values.

Are you absolutely sure that you have to use all those "bad" things?

Cursor and dynamic SQL?

Can you expand a bit on what you are trying to do?

/Kenneth

Well, this is a very subjective measurement, and it's not quite accurate for the purpose either.

What you are measuring here is just the time it takes for the client to...

There is NOWAIT in SQL Server as well.

Also have a look at procedures

sp_who, sp_who2, sp_lock, sp_lock2

Books On Line has more info on all above. (except the sp_xxx2 variants)

/Kenneth

What kind of errors? The funny char is there alright, but I could bcp it into a table without problems or errors.

Anyways, to get rid of it, you can use...

Hmmm.. it seems like it I think..

Is this a linked server btw? If so, perhaps try to drop and recreate the linked server may help..?

/Kenneth

Haven't run into this exact issue, but what about changing the destination datetime column to a char or varchar and see if the error prevails?

/Kenneth

It's not recommended to tamper with the systemtables manually (as I'm sure you know) Even if it would work, support is void if you go this route.

I haven't had the...

If you don't mind truncation, how about casting the offending column(s) to char/varchar with a length that will fit into the destination column(s) ?

Alternatively stuff it into staging table first, then...

Here's one way (of several) how to merge two files (ie header and data) into one...

-- generate headerfile

exec master..xp_cmdshell 'echo Tally of Sysobjects >> c:\header.txt'

-- generate...