Who said anything about optimizing? I described intermittent behaviour...

Not sure if any of what follows explains what you're seeing:

Have you looked at the execution plans on each of the boxes? Since prod is timing out, can you try...

I installed SQL2K on Win2K3 Server SP1 last week, which also had SQL2K5 on it.

Prior to install, I got the message that SQL2K SP2 AND below were not supported, please...

The other thing is, the function which runs against every row in a query amounts to row by row processing, something that could only be accomplished with a while loop...

I'll add one more vote to the DB per application.

We've centralized most of our lookups, and automated everything else, from creation to backups to transfers to security.

One other benefit...

Step 1: Get result set from server

Step 2: Run stored proc.

Until your browser asks for the new results, nothing has changed on your client. The row was deleted on the...

Not sure about SQL2005, but in 2000, you cannot Insert...Exec into a table variable.

Also, if/when you upgrade to a new server, all the old ids will not mean anything. You should probably use the object name instead.

No kidding!! I can see 1, 3, 4, and 5....

What is '13D5'? Why does it evaluate to 1300000?

Indices are allowed on #temp tables, and depending on the number of rows in the table, can dramatically affect performance.

Don't have a #temp table in one proc and call a...

Sorry about that, this treats less-than / greater-than symbols as HTML. I'll try that again:

SELECT CASE WHEN ISNUMERIC(Colname) = 1 THEN Colname

...

SELECT CASE WHEN ISNUMERIC() = 1 THEN

ELSE LEFT(, PATINDEX('%^[0-9]%', )-1)

END

FROM...

Since we're allowed to use QA and presumably access other DBs on the server, why not BCP in into a DB the list of customers, then use osql to run...

Yes, since I presume you don't want table locks because there is no "down time" to do the index maintenance.

In that case, you don't want slowdowns for both the...

Questions / comments

1) How big is your DB? We are running 40DBs or so on an RAID 5 server, total about 15GB (not big). The server has *never* been defragmented....