Also, if you can, post the actual execution plan. This can show where you have missing or incorrect indexes, indicate the possibility of out of date statistics... all useful stuff...

Do you mean compare the data or compare the structures?

Rachel is right, Red Gate & Apex both offer great tools for doing either of these operations. I prefer the Red...

You're not...

You'll have to drop and recreate the primary key. Which means if the table is acting as the parent in referential constraints, you'll need to drop and recreate those references...

Considering the size of the table, yeah, I'd suggest a defrag. I wouldn't necessarily do a rebuild at with an index this size and this level of fragementation, but it's...

I think you're a bit confused by online & offline. Neither one requires access to the database to be stopped. The offline option only heavily, negatively, affects the creation of...

UPDATE STATISTICS is the best command for working with statistics since it has the most flexibility. However, for batch work, sp_updatestats can do all the stats on a database.

Here are some tutorials over at JumpstartTV that might help too:

This one exactly answers the question:

http://www.jumpstarttv.com/generating-sql-server-scripts-using-smo_425.aspx?searchid=3347

This one discusses capturing changes

http://www.jumpstarttv.com/capture-schema-changes-with-smo_412.aspx?searchid=3347

Here's the full list.

http://www.jumpstarttv.com/Search.aspx?terms=smo

You could also try to the tools from Red Gate (www.redgate.com).

You could use a coding language and make a call to SMO (SQL Management Objects) to generate the scripts. Since...

Also answered here:

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic588077-149-1.aspx?Update=1

Do you mean running scripts from the command prompt? Check out the functionality of sqlcmd.exe.

In addition to how to create an index, you might want to know about where to create them:

http://www.sqlmag.com/articles/index.cfm?articleid=5113

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Performance+Tuning/2770/%5B/url%5D

We've been using ER diagrams less and less for development and instead relying on tools like Visual Studio Team System Database Edition. But we still do use ER diagrams for...

If it's doing a seek operation, but it's still slow, I'm inclined to look at index fragementation or out of date statistics. You do have automatic update of statistics enabled,...

I've been working on the whole concept of unit testing TSQL for quite a while. At this point, I'm a bit more in Phil's camp. We do "unit testing" as...