On the SQL Server Most Valuable Professional (MVP) newsgroup, a private forum available to SQL Server MVPs, a recent thread raised an interesting question about the life expectancy of global temporary tables. Suppose you have a stored procedure that you mark as autoexecution by using sp_procoption so that the procedure will automatically execute each time SQL Server starts. You use the marked stored procedure to create a global temporary table in SQL Server 2000. One of the SQL Server MVPs wondered whether such a table would exist for as long as the SQL Server 2000 instance runs.