SSIS has a steep learning curve, but it has tons of features that don't exist in DTS.  It is a much more powerful tool, so it takes more effort to...

INIT & NO INIT are switches for the obscure BACKUP LOG and BACKUP DATABASE commands.  The standard maintenance plan creates a new file for every log backup, so these settings...

Shrinking files on a regular basis is not a recommended practice.  It causes physical file fragmentation over time.

If you must do it, you can do it with a maintenance plan. ...

A transaction log backup does cause the log file to shrink.  It truncates the active log, meaning it reduces the number of pages in the transaction log that are considered...

We have some SQL Servers at a web-hosting site and they all require IIS for the hosting company's maintenance tools.  IIS is not required for SQL Server, but perhaps there...

If the log for a 4 GB database grows to 8 GB in the 4-hour span between log backups, you've either got a huge amount of activitiy or a problem...

I see a lot of the same joins at the beginning and end of each view definition.  Could you isolate the different parts of each of the three views, union...

The problem is simpler when you realize you don't need a common table expression, ROW_NUMBER(), or a correlated subquery.  Once you put an identity field on avg_days and get the...

If you base your query on INFORMATION_SCHEMA views it should also work for SQL 2005.

select

c.TABLE_CATALOG

        ,c.TABLE_SCHEMA

        ,c

How about using a DTS package?  It should be able to handle existence checking, bulk insert, and file moving with no problems.

I pity your successors who would have to maintain that mess.  You're asking "Should I rewrite my application, or rewrite SQL Server?".  The answer is to rewrite the application, because...

Sorry, I didn't read all the messages.  My servers are still at SP1.

I have a CREATE DATABASE alert that works, with the definition below.  The response to the alert is to send email to DBA (a Windows mail group).  The alert definition...

OSQL, SQLCMD, and SSIS are all covered very well in the SQL Server documentation (Books Online).  Another option would be SMO.

Another possibility, if the previous excellent suggestions don't fix the problem, is having different data types in the joined fields.  This requires a conversion function which makes indexes useless.  The...