In short, homework.

Here's how it's done. Think about each of the objects you've just defined. There's a school, a student and student grades. Now think about how those objects relate...

And ditch the NOLOCK hint.

If the table has 100K of records, this looks like it's also returning over 100K of records. Is the WHERE clause not filtering at all?

Please don't cross post questions between forums. As you can see, we all go to many (most?) of the forums to answer. Cross posting just confuses the conversation.

Nope. No maintenance wizard, no SQL Agent, so to maintain Express editions you'll need to have some type of scheduling service and create T-SQL scripts for all the maintenance.

Gotta land on the other side on this one.

I spent close to 10 years as a DBA for a major insurance company and most of that time I did not...

It's certainly possible, and yes, it would matter. For example, you may have an application that knows it has issues with statistics, so as part of the install it creates...

SQL Server Availability Groups were introduced with SQL Server 2012. But there are other types of "high availability" options that are there in other versions of the product, as were...

Yikes! Not good. A consistency check should be run on the database right away. I hope you have good backups in place.

Replication is also supported in Standard. Mirroring is also supported by Standard (although a slightly reduced version). You can see the versions here.

Or you can set up mirroring or log shipping or replication... None are easy, but all can be done in such a way to get a read only copy of...

As you have it currently configured, you're right not to trust it. You're completely open to SQL Injection. For a good laugh, and a good education, see to Bobby Tables[/url]....

A database backup consists of all the committed pages of the database and enough of the log roll forward or roll back active transactions at the time of the backup....

You're going to have to go through all the processes of tuning the server, the database and the code. I'd suggest getting a copy of my book on query tuning....

What version of SQL Server? Is this an Express version? If so, it's probably just not started. You'll have to locate it within the file system to get it started....

As much as I'd like to say that Red Gate is the way to go, I think you'd be better off using SSIS to build out a migration between the...