Oh, and with the selectivity you're talking about (1000 unique values in 10 million rows), if that index is not covering, SQL is not going to use that index. Too...

The index is implemented much like a telephone directory. If you have a composite index (colour, age as a very contrived example) then the index pages look something like this

Black...

You'll have to script the database structure, bcp the data out and then recreate the DB on SQL 2000 and import the data. There's no downgrade option for SQL.

Check the database's status in the sys.databases view. Is it restoring or recovering?

SELECT LEFT(<Some Column>,8) FROM ....

SQL's native backups do not allow you to just restore a single table. You'll have to restore the entire database either as a new DB on the same server of...

So it's management studio's local work space. Good to know.

Try opening the file in notepad. I'd be interested to know if it's the query in there, or the results. I...

Yup. Should be fine.

Is it a SQL 2000 or a SQL 2005 database?

Databases cannot be downgraded in version. If the DB in question was detached from SQL 2005, it has to be...

Usually its enough to have 2 files on the same drive. If you're seeing IO bottlenecks on that drive, you may want to separate the data files onto different drives.

It...

The SQL database engine doesn't use temp files and certainly not in those directories. It uses TempDB for its temporary work space. Otherwise it uses its allocated memory.

It could be...

You should be able to safely drop the index on testplan. Not the others.

An index is redundant if the columns in it are a left-based subset of another index.

If...

Look up sp_executesql. It allows you to pass parameters in and out of dynamic SQL. I know there's a good example in books online showing exactly that.

I'd say use the dm_exec_query_stats. I believe there is a DBID in there. The plan cache is transcient, so commands may get removed from the cache and not all statements...

The keyword AS for specifying an alias is optional. These are equivalent statements

SELECT 1 AS This_Is_A_Column_Alias FROM SomeTable AS This_Is_A_Table_Alias

SELECT 1 This_Is_A_Column_Alias FROM SomeTable This_Is_A_Table_Alias