Thanks. Currently I'm working on existing installs that I'm trying to fix.

So, my "Domain\SQLservice" account user just needs to be a normal domain user, not an admin. And then put it in the local "SQL Server2005...$...$..." groups as needed ?

You can also specify the collation to use in the query itself:

select * from LINK.dbname.dbo.tbname where UPPER(Issuer) <> Issuer collate SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS

This looks significant:

Database or object is read-only

Do you want to move backups on and off the server ? I would think you should have "Remote Desktop" or something similar. Can you map to a drive...

Even if you don't have physical access, you should have some kind of remote admin logon ability.

What type of agreement do you have with them ?? Why can't you access your own servers ?

Not through a "backup" process, but you can write a simple script to copy the table to a new table, truncate the old table, and copy the data back in.

You should do a test restore for practice and make sure everything work. Take your live DB and Log backups, and restore them to "Restore_practice" database.

Maybe you could run a job every hour to join sysprocesses to syslogins by sid, and output to a table "recent_logins" ... include the nt_username. Then after a week, the...

eddy (9/23/2008)

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Sorry, i guess my question was not totally clear..

Backup in step 3 is been taken by redgates' sqlbackup (every night same time)

The backup/restore in step 2 is a T-Sql...

Why not use the profiler with sp:StmtStarting and sp:StmtCompleted in Stored Procedures Events / TSQL SQL:StmtStarting and SQL:StmtComplted for that particular Job to get the details instead of doing Print...

Jeff Moden (9/22/2008)

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Sam,

My recommendation is to peel one potato at a time. To know which potato to peel first, you must do some measuring. Put the following at...

It looks like you're backing up production in step 2, then again in step 3. Why not back it up first thing, then copy to another location. Then restore to...

If you have anything that's server specific, such as operator names for email notification, then make sure they already exist on the target server. You can script them out &...