I've never yet found the DTA to be either reliable or useful to me.

Last time I checked, it recommended creating a whole list of indexes which could all be satisfied...

Here's the best data I can find on the subject: http://www.confio.com/English/Tips/Async_Network_IO.php

It's one of those things where you have to dig into the application a bit to find out exactly what's...

If you're using WinZip, they have a command-line add-in that you can use to automate it. It has documentation on what commands to give it. It can do...

They all have plenty of future to them. No best choice on that.

Also keep in mind that, if you really want to do all of it, you've always got...

And the execution plan changes from time to time without the data changing?

Sounds like you may have buffer issues. How's the memory pressure on the server?

Admin usually pays more than dev, in companies large enough to differentiate the two. BI development usually pays more than either of those, and pathing from database dev to...

Is the drive the backup is being written to full?

Does the query have any input parameters or variables in it, or is it returning the exact same data every time?

On the DAO/ADO recordsets, those are usually objects in an application. You can use those to read from SQL Server, not the other way around.

On the question about the services,...

T-SQL (Transact SQL) is the language Microsoft SQL Server uses to get data into and out of the database. The database itself is just binary files managed by SQL...

http://www.bing.com/search?q=what+is+SQL+Server+Buffer+Cache+hit+ratio

It sounds like what you're looking for is "dynamic cross-tab" or "dynamic pivot". Search those terms. There are good articles on the subject.

You'll need to split the values into separate values, or use dynamic SQL to build your Where clause.

The article Ninja linked to is on how to split the values from...

Here's an article on that subject:

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Tally+Table/72993/

Here's another one:

http://www.simple-talk.com/sql/t-sql-programming/the-helper-table-workbench/

There are more if you search "split string in SQL" in Google/Bing/whatever.

What are you using for the compression? What application? Most have command-line options, and some have CLR integration capabilities.