Thanks for the responses so far.
Query analyser sounds like a useful tool that I wasn’t aware of, so I’ll need to give it a try. In practice I’m executing this query from SAS, sent to the server via an ODBC connection, but I can experiment in Management Studio first
The view I’m talking about only contains left joins and outer joins, so it shouldn’t be removing any records that I wouldn’t want returned (in theory it could be adding rows of nulls for mismatches, but I’d just throw these away later anyway).
In reality I’m only going to be running the query about 5 times across the next 2-3 weeks and then probably never again, it’d just speed up my work a bit if I could get some results in under 9 hours each time I need to re-run!