And I hate being predictable.

Maybe we can talk you into an article about your backup strategy and contrast it with how long to back up locally/copy to remote (no SSIS...

Well...by strange coincidence I do know of a company located near you that has an SSIS course!

Bob, I can see why that strategy makes sense, curious if you compared doing a local backup and then copy vs direct backup to other machine as far as overall...

I dont have a lot of faith in tape, for no rational reason - never had one fail, but I've heard about incidents where they have. As long as you...

Ouch, yes its a typo and/or poorly worded. Striped backups write a single logical backup across multiple physical locations, mirrored backups write multiple logical backups to multiple physical locations. Not...

I have not looked at their feature set recently, thats interesting that they have added value over and above just compression. Wonder if the competitors offer similar features?

I dont do a lot of merge, but I'd start with the dupe key error. You could either temporarily change the index definition of 'uc1SycContents' to be non-unique, or I...

I didnt catch the standard edition limitation, did my testing on Dev edition which of course has the Enterprise features. Dont think I'd upgrade to get this particular feature. I...

The backup util is interesting, havent looked into that area much, might have to give it a try!

Backing up to DVD means you can sleep well! Not often you can do that (back up to DVD that is) and good to use the option if it fits.

I've never tested either, at best they are clunky, but useful. Dont know that I'd want to call it from a proc that was hit hard every day, but for...

Or if you might need that space for other databases...

Jeff, Im curious why you went with xp_cmdshell over using sp_oa~ to drive the file system object?

Good initial post, and a good puzzle to sit down with - but I hate to see the noise level rising in the discussion. Fair enough to make sure someone...

I know we focus on db's here, but I think there is more call for browser portability these days than anything, and look at the pain that can result from...