How do you know an index is missing? What are you looking to do?

The question doesn't make sense by itself. There are not any "missing" indexes without some reason...

The U creates an alias, so you say

from MyTable a

and then you can use "a" in other parts of the statement. So

select a.col1, b.col2

from mytable a

inner join...

I think you want to convert rows to columns, so something like this:

select a.shape, a.value, b.header as length1, c.headers as length2

from a (first file)

left outer join...

Can you run it in some batches? I like David's thoughts above, but I wonder if 1000, or 10,000, or 100,000 rows seem to complete in reasonable times.

Has the data...

I have a Mac Dual Core for the kids, but haven't gotten around to putting Boot Camp or Parallels on it. NEed to try it and see. I just saw...

Yep, a bad cut and paste on my part

That's good to hear! It's the only one I have left. Of the 441, 443, 444 exams, I thought 441 was the hardest, but I took that last year in...

That's probably funny until it's your wife in silk that needs to wash her hands.

Be lots of manure shoveling for me if I try that one

Excellent! Define requirements might be step 5, but more likely step 6.

We're rewriting and the developers have this thread in their list of stuff to do, so we'll see. At the very least we'll let you set your timezone

OK, just got me with the explanation and I forgot the copy/paste.

Doh!

OK, the word from my hot new UK developers with lots of .NET and ASP experience is that it's...

The keyboard ones are funny for people that don't know their keys. While I'm not a touch typist, my fingers have a lot of memory from years of typing and...

I was hoping this would turn into more of a DBA debate on why we as a group of professionals get so worked up about various topics. Lately I've followed...

Lowell, our apologies.

It's can't be a simple timeout, but must be some intermittent error. I haven't seen it for months, but it happened this week to me and I was...

full outer join?