Great comments throughout

one of the issues i'm looking at is that for a table with 50 million records backing up that entire table might not be practical - and how...

I'm not too worried about having some data latency because this will be a bulk overnight job that only runs once at night.  I just need to to...

scott

cursor thresholds are a new one on me...help a fellow dba out

transactional or snapshot replication..100% ... You want the data to be on your local drives. .. With replication it just keeps dribbling data.. The only bad bit is reinitialising.  With...

in that case the only other pertinent question is "how often and how many rows"..

if you are joining local to remote data in realtime then i'd use replication - if...

Linked servers are going to give you a lot of headaches in terms of performance.

how many tables do you need to query on the 2008 instance? - it might be...

Yep.

I've been pushing more and more to just get people in source control. By itself, no automation or another cool DevOpsy stuff, source control has benefits. Just gotta convince...

one last thing... have you got a query plan for the process that "might" be causing you an issue...it could be as simple as a join or "order by" spooling...

This is why we should comment our source code and version control checkins - so those who follow us can better understand why we did things the...

the only thing I can think to suggest is in the code for the report, do something like..... scrape the report folder from the URL (or other ways) and try...

Totally could be. It's tempdb, the midden heap of SQL Server. We all know it could be a million and one different things, or combinations of those million and...

It would definitely be interesting to do some performance tests with "read uncommitted" and see how badly I could break a test script. I am assuming that if you...

erm…. I picked up on one word - "weekend"

so is there any possibility that it's a rebuild index with "Sort in tempdb" option enabled... we all know which jobs we...

Good question and frederico's links showed me some things that I hadn't had chance to look at yet.

I'm guessing the application causing this is a Microsoft office (access/excel) app?

if you are asking what I think you are , then put a manual entry password on the report.. if it gets deployed to the wrong folder then the other...