Seems like you are trying to answer the wrong question, really.

But yes, Linked Server Performance is known to be poor. Honestly I don't understand all the underlying reasons but...

The users may be orphaned - did you recently restore the database from a backup?

Run this query -

EXEC sp_change_users_login 'Report'

If the logins show up on the list, run

EXEC...

Craig's sql statement is cleaner - do something like what he wrote.

That update looks very RBAR to me (google RBAR if you are not familiar with the term).

Not knowing much about the guts of what you are actually trying to...

How big is the partition that tempdb is on? What does your sysprocesses table look like when the cpu starts spiking ( as in, do you see one spid absorbing...

Just another avenue, kinda basic but haven't seen anything to the effect that you have done this yet, you might wanna verify - are you sure you dont have a...

Yea, the drop/create table is brutal... however what about drop/creating all the indexes if they won't shrink? if the table has 0 rows that seems like a pretty safe option,...

You could do a DBCC shrinkdb... but that would be a database-wide shrink which may not be desirable.

You could also drop/create table...

Not a book, but an excellent resource nonetheless -

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bobmeyers/

Why not just remove all "(", ")" and "-" characters, similar to

REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(phone_number, '(', ''), ')', ''), '-', '')

And then maybe do an additional check like ISNUMERIC(),

Then if the validation...

Where is the option for violating the rule "Don't attempt to cram 10 table's worth of entities and attributes into 1..."

Perhaps you aren't looking for someone to ask this, but why are you thinking of partitioning? Are you having performance problems? Do you have slow running queries?

My thoughts on...

Ah, tricky question. The gotcha is the "User-defined function" element. If I had read it twice over, I may have gotten it right 😀