Hurrah!

That works perfectly

Many Thanks PW!

Now I'm getting a:

Server: Msg 245, Level 16, State 1, Line 1

Syntax error converting the varchar value 'QA879.1' to a column of data type int.

I can tell you don't have...

Thanks for that, but the ordering is wrong.

On my SQL 2000 pubs database the first three rows from your query are:

maintitle                                                                       

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

this book at top of the list

But Is...

Well we found the cause of the problem - it was our Compaq Storageworks SAN that had three failing drives, and was giving errors. Quite why it failed in this...

Thanks Rudy,

The SQL Error log and in fact the event log of the "Eeams" server do occasionally (once a day) post a deadlock message, and state that one of the...

Database changes before, during, and since the last backup are stored in the tables of the database. I think I misunderstand your question.

If you are backing up a transaction log...

Thanks - will try running these.

What seems wierd to me is that when the system is in this failing mode the "chain" and "subject" sp calls will run fine, each...

I didn't write the SQL code or indexes, but I think they are correctly configured and optimised otherwise I would have problems all the time not just after several months...