Acceptable data loss is one of the main things that determines whether or not log backups are necessary and how frequent they should be....

How much data loss is acceptable if a drive fails or the database becomes corrupt?

Generally the log file should be on a separate physical drive from the data files, TempDB should have its own physical drive and the OS+ swap file should be on...

Without table structure and indexes, difficult to say much more than has been said.

What are you planning to do with those half a million records?

Update all statistics after the upgrade to 2005. The 2005 optimiser doesn't much like the 2000 style statistics.

Also, as far as I know, there is no 64-bit version of dtsrun,...

As Jeff said, not possible.

I'm curious. Why would you want to do a select with an UPD lock and then immediately commit the transaction? You're not achieving anything as the...

You're right, it's not. It is however very worth the price. I seriously doubt you are going to find a free tool for this.

Just be aware that the info is only in the log until the next checkpoint (if on simple recovery) or log backup (on full or bulk-logged recovery)

Use the TABLERESULTS option of showcontig

Something like

INSERT INTO ContigCheckTable

EXECUTE ('DBCC SHOWCONTIG WITH TABLERESULTS, ALL_INDEXES')

Not sure about the timeout settings (I'm not a .net developer), but timeout in general means something took too long. You can either change the timeout settings or you can...

Task manager's a bad place to look at memory for SQL. Rather use Perfmon and look at things like the process's working set or the target and total server memory...

None that I've heard of. Intellisense is a very hard thing to do in T-SQL because of the language format.

In fact, the only ones I know are SQLPrompt, SQL 2008's...

A CTE is in essence a temporary view. It's a named query that only exists for a single query after its defined. It simplifies writing queries with complex subqueries that...

Check that the front end is inserting into the database you think it is. It's an easy mistake to make.

I'm not deriding you. Bear in mind that we all have our own jobs and our own lives. We don't get paid to answer questions here. Be patient.