This should already be automatically logged to the SQL Server Error log. How are you executing this UPDATE statement? If you could, please post the update TSQL and...

Best practices? It depends. Perhaps use a 3rd party software like centreon/nagios, or RedGate SQL Monitor, or Idera free admin tool (all would work).

For options 1 and 3 you...

Alerts set up via the manager don't always set up correctly (at least in my experience) so I suggest scripting them out and ensuring you have the @shouldalert set to...

Powershell?

What query are you attempting to run? And are you asking to restart a windows service on an external machine via TSQL?

Check that the firewall is enabled on the Windows 7 machine (by default it is). It may be blocking port 1433. Also please check the Event viewer logs and...

Yes. If you use the queryout option and use union all to link a column list with the actual content.bcp "SELECT 'col1', 'col2', 'col3' U NION ALL SELECT col1,...

FYI, in its simplest form

USE [DATABASE]

GO

DBCC SHRINKFILE (N'Database_log' , 0)

GO

Please review this similar post, it will give you a script to accomplish what you want and outline some things to think about before you actually make a decision to...

Correct. You can change the names of the database and files during the restore process

In binary form or the actual character string of contents from within the text file?

Installing a different instance shouldn't matter as it'd be SERVER\DEV and SERVER\QA

You could keep the same database names as well, and wouldn't need to change the database name during restores

It is my understanding that your VLFS have gotten so high because of potential autogrowth in your transaction log(s) over time. Depending on the size of your database, 1000...

While I don't recommend or endorse this, you could add a job step that has a SELECT 1/0 in it (that never actually gets run, the prior step would report...

The only thing I can think of is to stop the job and update the status in msdb to reflect an error, but how that would actually work with the...

Great points! Also, if the query suddenly started performing poorly first you start with your execution plan, but you would also want to check to see if your statistics...