glad to hear it Adam. Aren't the RS errors great!

definitely install SP3 to get that out of the way.

try connecting to this RS instance via SSMS from somewhere. see what happens.

you should just connect to the local server, just...

Adam, if I read this right, in instance selection you want the name of the server you have installed reporting services on.

you would point RS to the cluster in the...

As said before its a system process connected to the database, could be a checkpoint process, a cleanup task, number of things. Either add a where spid > 50 or...

IIS is a pre-requisite for reporting services, so it needs to be installed. It does not need to ne enabled or configured though for RS to install

If you do detach your databases make sure when you reattach you reset the owner of the database to what it was, and check the default database setting for logins...

cheers rob.

for the benefit of anyone with the same problem in the future, how?

as for database diagrams., in enterprise manger, expand the database you want a diagram for, right click on the 'diagrams' option and create a new diagram. There are filtering options.

On this site, top right corner is a search bar. this is your friend.

I entyered 'foreign keys' refined the search to scripts only, first result was this:

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/Foreign+Key/64333/

if you mean SQLAgent jobs, they are stored in the msdb database.

You can also right click on the jobs and script them out as a belt and braces recovery method.

Is the backup copied off the server to another location after completion (say to tape)?

If so its safe to overwrite the backup file on disk each night, Use a...

That sounds rather frequent for the backups. Depends on your recovery requirements but daily full backups usually more than suffice with say 4 hourly diffs and tran logs between. Thats...

Here's an option that might not work but if it does will avoid causing fragmentation.

use the truncateonly option in the shrink command. If the last used extent is at the...

people keep mentioning 'instances' of oracle and SQL but are we comparing apples to apples here?

An instance of oracle is just another database, an instance of SQL is a whole...