I don't know if I understand correctly your question, but I'll try to give an answer. You can shrink the data file to give out the free space in it...

Everything depends on what plan is being cached. Every time the procedure is recompiled, the plan is put into the cache. The parameters used for that recompile generate a plan...

Thanks, but we still don't know if this is what the OP is after.

Could turn out to be cool... garbage! 😛

I don't think I understand what you mean with "better solution".

Anyway, duplicates cannot be ignored, as Dave already pointed out.

I don't think that "random" and "unique" can live...

I wanted to see if there's some kind of "catch-all" query involved in your procedure. This is well known to cause problems with parameter sniffing and inaccurate query plans.

You...

This should do the trick for you:

DECLARE @Art TABLE (

[Art] char(1),

[Status] varchar(3),

[Date] datetime

)

INSERT INTO @Art

SELECT 'A', 'In' , '2009-10-10' UNION ALL

SELECT 'A', 'Out', '2009-10-15' UNION ALL

SELECT 'A', 'In' , '2009-10-16'...

Could be parameter sniffing, but it's difficult to say without seeing the code.

Can you post the code, or, at least, part of it?

This code gave out only 253 duplicates on 16 Mln records.

I don't know if this is exactly what you're after, but you could give it a go.

SELECT TOP 1600000 RIGHT(master.dbo.fn_varbintohexstr(hashbytes('MD5',CAST(NEWID()...

Personally I would disable their login until they fully understand what they're doing.

Consider it could take forever...

I'm asking myself if they're making a cert exam for it...

The error message you posted appears to be truncated, since this looks like the notification email.

Can you please post the actual error message, taken from the maintenance plan history?

Hope I wasn't too rude.

This guy has the ability to drive me insane (maybe it's his signature???) .

If you can't use profiler, go with DMVs or SET STATISTICS TIME ON.

As far as the percent improvement is concerned, it's simple maths, nothing that a "Senior Software Engineer" can't...

Forgot to mention: it took something like 3 hours to install, be sure you don't need your computer while you install...

Yes, it can be done. I did it, with no problems.