I think big keys to the problem is what do the corporate policies have in place, what laws are in place, what learning plans have been implemented to try and...

Intriguing question. I enjoyed it. Thanks

8 Files for a 4.5GB database is overkill. For a database that small, I would not split the files. I would look to performance tune the code.

That said,...

From that script it looks like your issue could be one of two things or a combination of both.

Issue #1: You are excluding all tables that are heaps. To...

use alter index ... Rebuild since you are on SQL 2008

No.

I do this quite frequently where I add files that are smaller and then rebuild the indexes.

Once the rebuild is complete you can work on shrinking the original file.

Is it possible that the app server has a different timestamp than the database server?

It is possible that the app is misreporting it as a deadlock as well.

If you have several files in the filegroup, set to the same size and set to evenly grow, then a rebuild of the CI or heap will usually split the...

Try this

SELECT xed.value('@timestamp', 'datetime') as Creation_Date,

xed.query('.') AS Extend_Event

FROM ( SELECT ...

If your system_health session is running, then you can query the ring buffer (the default output of that session) and maybe find the deadlock.

You can rebuild the clustered index or the heap for each table.

I wonder if your share name is causing some issues behind the scenes. C$Z might be trying to resolve to the admin share of C

Do you have the system_health XE session still running?

Also, where did you confirm that a deadlock happened?

when you past this path into a run window (start->run), does it produce an error or open an explorer window with contents?

Sounds like you are using Talisma. In some cases they named their distribution database as tlmain.

At any rate, distribution databases can have...