You can't restore to another server & try to test it there? I'd argue it's important to get something like this right because messing it up could be painful.

Testing is your friend. Try Phil's suggestion. It's likely going to be faster just based on the simple idea of data movement. Moving 100 million rows through the copy may,...

Do you mean just a simple backup and restore, not data changes at all, no inserts, deletes, nothing like that, and suddenly SOME values are different after the restore?

Nope.

That doesn't...

You are getting a scan of TAllData (please tell you don't have a naming standard where you name all tables T*). It doesn't have filter criteria, but it does have...

Read the full error message. It says something about incorrect number of parameters. Without seeing your code or the message or anything else, I can't tell you what's going on,...

8gb is probably low. Jonathan Kehayias is someone I really trust on this. Follow his advice.

Yep. AdventureWorks in all it's messed up glory. Honestly, I love that sample database. Why? Because it looks like all the other messed up constructs I see everywhere else. It's...

Actually it sounds like you could put a tally table, or a table of numbers to work and simply pass in your 1-10 tanks (which really does sound like a...

Also, don't set the max of SQL Server to max of the system. You have to leave room for the operating system to have memory as well. While you can...

Without a WHERE clause, no filtering occurs, so it goes to the cluster to pull stuff together. If you want to eliminate the sort, you can create an index on...

Thank you everyone.  I have been saving the files to a folder.  it works for me because I only have a few queries. I am so used to...

If you do this a lot, create a stored procedure or maybe a view. If nothing else, have the query in a file that you can open & run. That...

Welcome to the party.

Pretty much what Jeff says (btw, that's a good mantra around here).

SQL Server's principal tool, SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), has a thing called a project. I...

Along with what Grant has stated and since they said it did "regular" SQL Backups, have them do a test restore using native tools only to prove...

Yeah, go get that lottery ticket now.

Happy to hear it all worked out. As Jeff says, get going on those backups. In addition to all his great info, let add...