try using ISNUMERIC in the order by

SELECT * FROM yourTable

ORDER BY ISNUMERIC(yourCol), yourCol

the performance will probaly be the same unless you are using an index view

It is fairly easy to test

You don't need to buy Visual Studio 2008 to get SQL Server 2008 developer, you can buy SQL 2008 developer as a stand alone prodcut for about £30

Stay away from the EAV especially if your table is going to be heavily searched.

http://www.simple-talk.com/sql/t-sql-programming/avoiding-the-eav-of-destruction/

Lowell (1/11/2010)

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there is no difference; SQL is smart enough to know there is no reason to retrieve rows for the count() function, and does it the fastest way possible; count(*),count(someColumn)...

The first step would be to check the sql server error log this will have an entry for the Failed login and the error code. From this you can...

Is data being written and modified on both servers?

If so, you could use SSIS to sync the data and set this is a job to run frequently, however you...

to get the file location of the full text catalog

SELECT * FROM sys.fulltext_catalogs

Why are you then declaring @Contracts as a unicode text data type?

if thre are only integers then you wont need to use unicode so it would be better to use...

It is hard to tell without seeing some sample data,

however what data type is GCI_PM_FileSubTypeXContract.ContractID ?

Is this a straight import or do you have any data transformations?

The error message that is returned when you try to Truncate the table will have the name of the constraint that is the problem.

You may have to drop most if...

pankaj.baluni (1/5/2010)

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Do you have old .mdf and .ldf files(not of the day when DB got corrupted)? you might have taken file backup on some storage.... so get it and save...

Those steps 'should not' corrupt the database.

Can you post the output from running CHECKDB ?

this book has some excellent information about the Optimizer

http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-SQL-Server-2008-Internals/dp/0735626243/ref=pd_sim_b_2

infact the entire

Inside Microsoft SQL Server series is excellent in helping understand the internals of SQL server.