suggest could be a trace file of some type - nothing on my systems like this, but I do have temp env vars set to a different drive.

well it sounds like an io wait .. use the function sys.fn_virtualfilestats to see what's going on initially.

the partial script you've pasted doesn't look like it's written for sql...

I never understand why there's this issue of shrinking logs - chances are that you'll need that space at some time, probably an index rebuild. The art of managing databases...

well in an unscientific test ( I increased column sizes in a few tables in a test database ) I saw no change in the table size. I have...

Hi - oh such a long time ago!! I did actually raise the issue with microsoft and in SQL 2005 you can't clear Tempdb buffer cache, it's not particularly...

The whole point about backups is that you must be able to recover from them. We don't run our prod SQL on VMWare ( or Hyper V ) why would...

I'm not quite sure exactly what you're asking here. Some years ago I looked into using san replication but there is/was the distinct possibility of getting inconsistant data in the...

Our BI team take 6 hourly diffs - there's some disruption during restores - but we use litespeed ( which is quick ) have fast disk subsystems and lots of...

sorry, I intended to say I'd never go the new table and rename route - why would you want to do that to a table with say 80 million rows?...

I did this and offhand can't remember exactly what I did - I think I dropped the PK, altered the column, rebuilt the PK.

The tables in question had int PKs...

I have a stored proc which writes free space into a table ( so I can track growth if required ) I then have a ssrs report which shows me...

I hope you're aware of the negative effects of shrinking a data file?

If you must shrink a datafile you should rebuild all the indexes afterwards to get all the...

for reference this explains, note that there are some differences in windows 2008 r2 clustering.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc731002(v=ws.10).aspx

I probably do much as you do. I do have server dashboards which run in SSRS so I have reports which provide info on partitioned ( and compressed ) tables/indexes.

I...

you might look into Litespeed, you can adjust the level of compression.