dbcc shrinkfile(file_name, 12345) - target size in MB.

Again, do it by small chunks

Set db to simple recovery and delete data in a loop in small chunks. If you can't set it to simple, run backup log after every delete.

But if it will...

Thank Lowell, I updated my script with this hint.

delete msdb.dbo.sysjobhistory

where dbo.agent_datetime(run_date, run_time) between <date_time> and <date_time>

Have you tried to move the file after backup has completely finished? Because I suspect that you tried to move the file while it was still filling up by backup...

If you see a chain of blocks that hold waiters for a long time, you can kill the spid that is in the very beginning of this chain.

DBCC opentran...

You can create a daily/hourly/minutely job that queries sys.databases join sys.sysprocesses and inserts results into a some table, and run it for a while.

Run this:

select * from sys.stats

where object_id = object_id('tbl1')

If it is still empty, than you don't have any indexes and never ran any select query that has where or order by...

From my point of view, it's not a big difference between employee and consultant, I've been working in both cases, even I had a combo - contract-to-hire.

In many cases it's...

Most of our databases are properly indexed, there are of course some exclusions, but generally they don't affect replication latency. Data/log files are split on different physical hard disks, and...

Thanks Bill for very interesting and very detailed lessons.

But functions like DISTINCT, BLANK, SUM are relatively easy and trivial. Everyone who have ever worked with Excel or SQL will quickly...

Do you want these 4 files to share the same filegroup or to have dedicated filegroups?

For the former just add 3 more files to a primary or another filegroup that...

Try to do this experiment:

Run DBCC loginfo immediately before and after your log backup. Load its results to some table or copy/paste to Excel.

Sum(FileSize) where Status = 2 ,...

But why do you think that he "asked the question entirely wrong way" ? It could be a way that you simply not aware of. And how you could obtain...

Is your database partitioned? With the size of 15 TB I assume that yes, but if not, you can consider partitioning large tables with setting old partitions to read-only. You...