First, you want to gather information about the backups that exist. The best way to do this is to get the header information:

RESTORE HEADERONLY

FROM DISK = 'c:\data\restoretest.bak';

That will give you...

Steve Jones - Editor (10/5/2009)

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I miss anything? Just cranky old guys and gals complaining?

The post is a little self promotion, but I'm more willing to tolerate authors promoting themselves than...

You don't need to install Operations Manager. You can download the sql server management pack and then review what it does.

Access only queries move all the data for the tables they're referencing locally to Access and then apply filters & joins to the data. That's why the performance is horrific....

Yes.

ZeeAtl (10/5/2009)

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Let's say I have 3 separate [days] backups in one (appended) backup file.

Can I stipulate, later, that I want to restore any one of those days as a point...

I agree with Barry and Paul on this one. The exceptions that I've seen are usually where, usually due to badly written code or poorly designed structures, the only possible...

ItalianOlgi (10/3/2009)

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Jeff Moden (10/3/2009)

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ItalianOlgi (10/3/2009)

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Thank you for very good advice but maybe someone has the list I was asking about?

Also, I am looking for information like "if they ask about...

Yet more agreement with Jeff. It's what I've done in the past and it's what third party vendors like Documentum do.

Operations Manager needs it's own server. Then you register your server with it and it starts monitoring. It provides a client interface to retrive the data collected.

ready2drum (10/2/2009)

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Okay...so if I'm using SQL Server 2005, where do go to execute that command? when you say it's in there, are you referring to the dynamic management view (sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats)?...

ready2drum (10/2/2009)

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While trying to determine when a specific table was last updated, an error message appeared (using SQL Server Management Studio).

Error:

Msg 208, Level 16, State 1, Line 1

Invalid object...

No, Operations Manager is a completely seperate product from Microsoft. But it does work off of the performance monitor counters like most other monitoring products.

Hmmm... Have you looked at the execution plans for the quick & the slow execution? Check the connection properties from the ORM tools to see if they're setting something differently...

You can move the CSV files into a database. There, you've got all the tools you need for interpreting the data.