I'd recommend not using administrative shares in order to perform those backups.

Create a shared folder on the TEST server (such as \\TEST\ProdBackups$) and set the permissions on the share and...

Can you provide the full DDL for the two tables?

There's no hard and fast answer for how long it will take to compress that table. There are too many factors which would impact the time such as the CPU...

You'll need to join the snapshots.performance_counter_instances.performance_counter_instance_id to snapshots.performance_counter_values.performance_counter_instance_id.

The performance_counter_instances table contains a list of the counters, search for the object_name of "Network Interface" and choose the relevant counter you...

The only other thing I can think is to check Active Directory and see if the account got moved in to another domain.

I've seen it happen in the past...

When you attempt to disable that account are you running the query under the context of a sysadmin or securityadmin account?

Can you confirm that the login itself exists as in...

Additionally this could be caused by database file growth when instant file initialization is not enabled, in particular when growing very frequently in tiny (1MB increments) or when a file...

Your mount points must live on a root drive. You create the DTC resource and then specify that root drive as a dependency.

Here's a quick couple of bullet points that...

Correct, you can't use a mount point for MSDTC (I wrote about it here, it's not well documented).

You could however use the root disk where you are placing your mount...

Just as you pass in different values for the file location in the job step you can change the connections strings also. Try updating the value in the Data Sources...

Honestly your select doesn't appear to be the big issue here, rather it's the insert that's being performed into the dbo.result_table where it's updating the clustered and non clustered indexes...

You need to create the COM object first using sp_OACreate.

Check out this SSC article which has some good examples.[/url]

I agree with MysteryJimbo, use DNS to handle connectivity to your machines. That way you can simply repoint DNS to the new server and your connections will be automatically repointed.

There are multiple ways to configure MSDTC for a cluster (see this excellent explanation by Cindy Gross). I highly recommend having one MSDTC per cluster instance and having DTC as...

In SQL 2000 and early builds of 2005 you could get a memory dump and grab the information if that user was logged in, however the SQL team has secured...