As GilaMonster says, check your perfmon counters on your disk i/o - I'd figure that was your problem.

My guess is memory is the primary bottleneck.

With frequent inserts, updates and...

One thing that I like about snapshots is the ability to combine then with mirroring and turn your inactive failover server into a reporting server.

As for on my production server,...

They might be blocking in TempDB, especuially if both are creating temp tables or running queries that require hash tables or work tables.

When you notice blocking, take a note of...

The only way to guarentee the order of a resultset from a query is to put an order by on the query. You cannot depend on the order that the...

Some comments on order by

SQL is allowed to ignore an order by in a subquery, if there is no top present. There is no order guarenteed in the following query.

SELECT...

What we do is to insert the results of xp_cmdshell into a table then check the table for error messages.

It's not a perfect solution, as you have to do...

If autoshrink is on, switch it off. Autoshrink should never be on for a production database.

Other than the issue where you don't know when its going to shrink, and may...

It's just the excel formatting. Nothing wrong with the data

Highlight the cells, and apply one of the formats under date.

What error messages are you getting from the application when you try and connect?

Ah, sorry. I misunderstood you.

Yes, but you need to find out what field is the pk and how the values for it are generated. It may be an autogenerated value, it may be a...

Once more with feeling. Don't take the primary key off unless you know exactly what you're doingf and exactly what the consequences will be.

It's there to ensure data integrity....

There's often a lag in stats update with large tables, even if autoupdate is on. I've seen it a few times on my 50+ million row tables.

Do an update stats,...

You'll have to look at the database structure to find what field is the pk, or ask someone who knows the system. You can see the db structure with Query...

It means that your stored procedures are taking too long to execute.

The connection from the web server has a timout set in it, if the server doesn't return results...