You can encrypt connection strings in your config files to help security some.  If you're using SQL Server or Windows authentication, you do want all connections from the application server...

not necessarily on the server itself, but you do have to be in the SYSADMIN or SECURITYADMIN role for the instance to see the logs in Management Studio

You can look at the error logs in Management Studio under:
Management \ SQL Server Logs \ Current
to see a more detailed message on why the login failed.  Schema...

The thing to think about for each relationship when deciding if you need the intermediate tables, is the relationship really one to many or many to many.

In the...

it's understandable, to shrink a database file, SQL Server will need to rearrange all the pages that are at or near the end of the file into other space that...

I've got a question, in the original post you said that you wanted the entry with the most recent date by Contact, but the queries posted here are getting the...

Phil's suggestion works for table valued functions, and you can also use dm_exec_describe_first_result_set but you'd have to make the first parameter as a query to the TVF not just the...

Something I'm not sure about here, it's clear from your example data a Batch can have multiple JobCreationDetail rows, but can a JobCreationDetail row belong to more than one Batch? ...