Open a T-SQL query window, make sure that the database context is NOT the database Mirror, and then use T-SQL to do the config.

The connection that you're using for the...

Ok, so you want to count() the student names and group by the scholarship

If the default DB is master, then to get that...

That's not what you asked for. The original question was to count the StudentName (the column in the count) per category (the group by), not count the unique scholarships in...

Well. sure. There's a limit of just over 2 billion (certificate ID in the system table is an int). Not...

Look up COUNT(DISTINCT...) and GROUP BY in SQL's documentation (called Books Online)

To restore a DB that's been encrypted, the server must have the certificate that was used to encrypt that database. You can't decrypt with any old certificate, if you could,...

Index rebuilds can be minimally logged in simple and bulk-logged recovery model. It's fully logged in full recovery, which means it's a size-of-data operation in terms of log space used.

For any pre-release version, I recommend reinstalling from scratch. I usually just delete the VM and rebuild it.

That's why you got the error logging in then. You can't open a DB that's in RESTORING, it's not accessible.

Either change the sa login's default database to master, or don't...

Honestly, you should first be looking at normalising the table design. The first is not normalised and hence you have these kinds of problems.

To solve it in the mean time,...

If you mean improve it, not much. It won't be a noticeable improvement in most cases. Couple...

Looks like you're just using the CaseOrderline for filtering. If so, try this

SELECT C.CaseId,

CONVERT(INT,ROW_NUMBER() OVER(ORDER BY C.createDate ASC)) AS sequenceId

FROM tblCase C

WHERE EXISTS (SELECT 1 FROM tblCaseOrderline CO WHERE C.caseId...

What state is the database in? (Online, recovering, restoring, ...)

What, specifically, do you want? A trigger to prevent any logins being given the sysadmin role? To prevent any roles being created with the CONTROL SERVER permission (equivalent to sysadmin)?...