here's an example I keep around for casting from nvarchar to varbinary and then back to nvarchar:

the key is to use nvarchars... i beleive this fails if you try to...

I saved this snippet for SQL2000, so i would assume it would still be valid in 2005; hope this helps:

USE master

go

EXEC sp_grantlogin 'BUILTIN\Administrators'

go

EXEC sp_defaultdb 'BUILTIN\Administrators', 'master'

go

EXEC sp_defaultlanguage 'BUILTIN\Administrators', 'us_english'

go

EXEC sp_addsrvrolemember...

here's one of many citations on it from microsoft: i just searched for sql 2005 server multi core processors and grabbed the first link

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/2005/msde2sqlexpress.mspx

so to be clear, if you...

it's physical processors that are counted, not cores...so you could have a 4 processor all with quad cores, as i remember it, and it would work with no problem

valuable article; whenever I found a situation similar to this, I always blamed out of date statistics, and updated statistics and recompiled procedures; nice detective work, I have a better...

Tony may be on to something....a typical problem where something works fine, and then slows down over time often points to out of date statistics on the database; this can...

i think what you are seening is whenever anyone is given the role db_owner(), their user_name is considered to be dbo for the queries performed.... since everyone else comes in...

i fat fingered the link and added a backslash..sorry.

I edited the link and it does take me to the right spot now.

a better explanation of index hints than BOL supplies can be found here:

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/columnists/rmarda/performanceaddinghints_printversion.asp

it's bad to second guess SQL Server's abilities as far as deciding which index to use, but...

you didn't really describe what the problem was...whether it was slow running, received a real error, or just bad performance.....so here's my guesstimate:

There's no problem creating a really big temp...

Glad you worked it out , Dave;  keep reading SSC; lots of good stuff here.

it looks to me like you are using a loop to insert one group of data at a time, when you could do it all as a single set based...

are you sure you want to do in in SQL Server? why not a programming language, like .NET,VB6 or something?  you stated you just want to copy it to disk,...

pointing out the obvious, but you should not be trying to display all 4.8 million rows in EM while connected to a production database....

you are right, EM and SQL server...

i can only suggest some general/generic things to look at; nothing obvious or strange in your query, so I'd look at things like service pack on the machines that fail...