.........and another point, this process will cause fragmentation, so rebuild\reorg your indexes afterwards

good point vivien. The effect would be as any other shrink, there would be a performannce hit and the shrink would tend to get blocked out by other users....

for each .ndf , one at a time-

dbcc shrinkfile(filename,emptyfile)

alter database dbname remove file filename

back the database up first!

no probs. thanks for posting the full resolution.

Ah, the isalive process is getting there first. I think you need to go to cluster admin and take sql resources offline first (to take cluster out of it) and...

I seem to remember reading that SSMS fires up more than one connection so you will have problems using it in single user mode. Execute the restore master command...

I cannot think of a benefit. You are allowed to do it by the syntax bit I have never had a case where I have needed the loginname different to...

And of course one more major difference -

In log shipping everything that happens within the primary database which is logged is transferred to the secondary, so adding users, tables,...

no direct way to do this from a sql backup. common method is to restore the .bak file to a database with a different name then copy the table you...

I always think of replication as 'scale-out' and log shipping as scale-up.

i.e if you want to a copy of the database so more people can use the data from multiple...

...actually, thinking about it it's logical, you can't recover a tran log backup till after a full backup restore, so whats the point in keeping log records until a full...

I'll be dipped too.

I never knew that and would never have expected it to be the case. You learn something everyday.

MS must have decided it was more important not to...

this is posted under reportig services, is it reporting services you are trying to connect to?, does not sound like it. If it is not you would do well to...

if it is a default instance you need only the virtualname, machine name not required at all. Local will not work either.

as a clustered instance you should be connecting to SQL by its virtual name you specified when installing, not the machine name, could that be your problem?