I installed Management Studio on a desktop and I'm connecting through
a non standard port to a sql 2005 db engine on another network,
through a firewall.

Executing query this way:

1) Connect
2) New Query
3) select * from mytab

works like a charm.

Instead, trying to doing:

1) Right click on table
2) Open table

is VERY SLOW to fetch all data.

This does not happen locally to the db engine.

Any help appreciated.

Regards.

Don't use Open Table? Since this provides some level of concurrency and the
ability to actually edit the data, it is much more expensive than a simple
SELECT *. In fact, in SQL Server 2008's version of Management Studio,
you'll find that Open Table has disappeared, and replaced by a much more
friendly option to Edit (n) rows. There is also an option to SELECT (n)
rows, which does what you are doing in the first example above. Still, the
first option is almost always going to be better than the right-click
options, IMHO. You can read a lot of the background in these two connect
items I filed in 2007:

http://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServ...spx?FeedbackID
=269555

http://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServ...spx?FeedbackID
=264592

A