I do work for Red Gate, but was doing this before I got the job.

I keep my personal scripts in the Snippets Manager within SQL Prompt. You can add a...

Can you just build the query into the process that does the restore?

If not, you'll need to have a T-SQL statement with a TRY/CATCH that you can run, probably on...

Basically you need to understand the business requirements and then validate that the data structure will meet them. It's conceptually insanely simple. It's a ton of work in practice.

It depends on where you're measuring from. From the client, you have to include the round trip time for the query to leave app, go to the server, get processed,...

The one thing to keep in mind when setting up any backup plan is the restore process. Because, after all, the backup is not the most important part, the restore...

Since you're seeing intermittent behavior, I would suggest looking for resource contention and blocking. Next time it's running slow, run a query against sys.dm_exec_requests to see what the process is...

And the indexes have to be selective enough to be useful for a seek or you'll get scans. Same things apply to non-clustered indexes too.

For lots more detail on query...

Once. Had an app that was freaked that they were going to run out of numbers so we seeded them to max negative value so that they could increment all...

I wasn't aware that SQL Server on it's own EVER sent anything to the DBA proactively. All monitoring has to be built or bought.

I've built my own monitoring system several times. I wrote it all down in Chapters 2 & 3 of my book. I use a combination of performance monitor, SQL Server's...

You would already have to have in place auditing. Capturing RPC Starting from Extended Events or Trace Events and then comparing that to RPC Complete will let you know when...

Yes & no. It just stops allowing writes. You get errors. Reads work fine. All writes stop because there's nowhere for them to go.

It's not a question of which tables are accessed. It's a question of the queries being run against the indexes and statistics in support of those queries. Instead of looking...

Your choices are pretty limited. You can remove data and then shrink the database. You can use storage compression if you're using Enterprise in SQL Server. You can look at...

ChrisM@Work (11/29/2012)

This gets my vote,...