ALso, depends on what the script is for. I have scripts WCTP for paging, CDONT scripts, scripts to work with Excel objects, scripts that self reference the DTS packag for...

Yes an no. Depends on how clean yor answer needs to be. Quick, possibly look at using sp_MSForEachTable

exec sp_MSForEachTable 'SELECT ''?'' TableName FROM ? WHERE ColA = ValA'

Then look at SPID 1 and see when th server started. This is te primary connecton by the server management account. This will give you a start date and time...

I do believe retry is an immediate retry and has nothing to do with starting a job. All of my jobs are set to 0 and whn fails continue to...

They are meant as a cumulative and not for each. Only use these when you are tryin to determine what items may spend the most overall resource time an not...

1st I hve seen when the account SID in the DB does not match that of the Server login. Not uncommon at all.

2n however, I just have never come across...

The big thing is Readability. This is why the standards board approved the new syntax. It has been a pain in the past to debug queries which contained multiple tables especialy...

That is a question you will need to ask Microsoft. I do believe you can get a CAL version of 2005 and upgrade (at a cost) the CALs. But to...

You can do a

BACKUP LOG dbnm

WITH TRUNCATE_ONLY

which blows otu the ability to recover from the Transaction Log until you take another Full DB backup.

However it won't shirnk the fil...

First start with the basics. Defrag or rebuild the indexes. And capture the most intense queries to see why they are that way. Work with streamlining the current load first...

Can you be more descriptive as to what you mean?

See the following post.

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/forums/shwmessage.aspx?forumid=8&messageid=271272

As I recall it writes it out when 1 of the following occurr

SQL Server is stopped (even if is a restart)

Trace is stopped

Trace reaches @maxfilesize

To the absolute best of my knowledge the answer is NO. In fact I had someone in my group needing the very same thing. Ended up figuring it out myself...

Sounds like you haven't gone into SQL Server and granted the gropu rights to login and any other permissions they should have.