We do this a lot (not through an sp but manually) since we sometimes want to run tests on a database that contains actual production...

Is there something causing the SQLAgent service to be shutdown on Saturdays?

Here's a working example that executes a 'select *' on dbo.Table:

DECLARE @SQLString nvarchar(100)

set @SQLString = N'select * from '+ @@servername + '.' + db_name() + '.dbo.Table'

PRINT @SQLSTRING

EXEC(@SQLString)

If you are want to limit the size of your transaction log when moving large amounts of data, why not use "bcp" (bulk copy) and the batch size switches (see...

I have been reading "Microsoft SQL Server 2005 New Features Essential Skills for Database Professionals" by Michael Otey.  (ISBN - 0-07-222776-1)It is a good book.

You also might want to check...

As Deni Kusdeni mentioned, the current production versions of SQL Server does not support synonyms.  However, SQL 2005 will have the ability to assign synonyms to objects. 

You probably can't wait...