I have a database in the size range and practice a restore about once every two months.    Why?  Because some data changed and a comparison is needed!!  

I use a...

Frank, it took a year and a half..but I won that battle...almost fired because of it too.  Bad DBA wanting secure database not good when only DBA with 10 developers.  ...

Food for thought..........

• tempdb is recreated every time the db server is restarted.
• Make sure you have good stats updates
• Make sure you have a good reindexing plan.
• Check if freeing the buffer cache...

Good points.  I would ask the Development leader why he/she wants to go inline.  There may be some valid points to the response, but overall I would suggest using the...

File fragmentation is a good thing to look into 🙂   What would the difference be between a tool like Contig and the defrag tool that comes with the operating system.

Steve, ...

Was wondering when Frank would find this thread

I second Allen's questions.   And yes, the hyperthreading is the reason for the 4 cpu's in task manager.

When I first took this job I had a server do the same...

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/contributions/390.asp

My favorite way to monitor my files

Aaack...The pains of a DBA.  I'm pulling for you.   I haven't read the article yet.   A big issue is with recompiles and compiles.  That is an avenue you can take.  ...

IMO Enterprise Manager would be to tedious to manage that many servers.  It could be used to investigate problems, but for overall monitoring I wouldn't rely on just that.

There are...

MrSQL is right.   You may also look into DTS packages and setting something up to export the scripts for the objects.

I have  a process in place that extracts all of...

Watch the sysobjects table in tempdb too 🙂

Not that I know of.

You could set up a final Step (upon success of the others) that e-mails the second operator when the job completes.

Not sure what exactly you are looking for.  Are you looking for who or what caused the updates?  If so, I don't believe the tools mentioned above will tell you...

I kind of figured you took the tuning route already.    I've had my hands tied in a similar situation before, and bummer that we can't specify which cpu to use. ...