Being Able To Stop Parallelism In A C++ Program Calling SQL Server

Hi All,

I have written ETL software that runs on SQL Server. We are running it for the first time on a 4cpu (2 x dual core) machine on sql server 2005.



One of the things this software does is perform a 'select * from tablename' to validate that the tables passed to it as parameters exist. This has worked fine on previous releases and on single cpu machines because what the optimiser decides to do is to return just the first page of data and then fetch more. I guess it even works in 2005 standard edition.



However, 2005 enterprise edition allows parallelism. And what the optimiser is deciding to do with such a query is to parallelise it and fetch all rows and then give the result back to the program. So, instead of seeing a fraction of a second to return the first page of data we are seeing up to 90 seconds and the database goes and fetches 15M rows in parallel.



Obviously, what we would like to do is to somehow tell the optimiser that this set of programs should not perform any parallel queries. Or, we would like to turn parallelism off on the specific tables we are dealing with for the period of running these ETL programs....they have no need of parallel processing at the database level for virtually all the calls that are performed.



Would someone please be so kind as to advise us if we can do something like pass a parameter to ODBC to stop parallelism or if we can issue commands against specific tables to stop parallelism for a period and then turn it back on?



Thanks in Advance.



Peter Nolan

www.peternolan.com