Not a mystery. The view designer simply has limited functionality as do most designers in the system. Witht he exception of DTS Designer, I never use them.

I had no problem googling it: http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLG,GGLG:2006-24,GGLG:en&q=SQL+Backup+COW+SAN

COW = Copy on Write

Yes, if no one is there that is able to grant you the permissions you need, you are out of luck. You can not get the permissions any other way.

How many records is 1CR of records? I'm not familiar with that abbreviation other than a Carriage Return.

What you are asking for can not be solved in a single post...

It's giving you that error because you are using double quotes. Use single quotes and then within the query text, use two single quotes to denote a single single quote:

You have a much higher likelihood of getting a corrupted backup this way. Back up locally and then copy or move to the network share.

This procedure wouldn't work for me in SQL 2005. Casting the Context_Info as varchar did not work. I had to cast the string as binary(128).

I had to rewrite the trigger...

Are you only upgrading the distributor or are you upgraing the other servers as well?

There are some considerable differences with replication in 2005, and I would advocate dropping replication, upgrading,...

What were you upgrading it to? SQL 2005? Yes, you need to stop replication for any distributor upgrade.

What steps did you follow?

And install a virus on their computer that causes their keyboard to emit an electrical shock if they try to install the client tools themself.

Actually, the log file will default to the larger of 504Kb or 25% of the total size of all data files in the database. So if the model database has a...

No, that is incorrect.

You need 2 separate things:

1. A primary key on every table
2. A rowguidecol (uniqueidentifier) column

Replication will add #2 if it does not already exist. Those should be 2 separate...

On a related note, we have a project in development for our internal account managers and tech support team to be able to run any select query they want against...

Are tehre any triggers on the table? If so, what are they?

Selecting @v1 will not cause it to eecute a second time.

>> A complex statement is difficult to read when it is pieced together with a bunch of CHAR, CAST, and CONVERT fuctions.

I disagree. I think it is easier to read...