Make sure that his defaultdb is master, and that he has access to it (at least public), and of course access to the db he wants to connect to.  That...

Nice homework question, can you ask your teacher to e-mail me, I'd like to make him a few suggestions!

I've never seen that actually happen, however I've heard of such cases where ghosts were comming in fater us to do our work.

Your next step is to check out the...

Check out the parenthesis, looks like you are missing a few, sorry but since I can't test this I really don't have time to search further...

Just add a new calculated field in the table, index it (makes it materialized), make sure that your query uses the correct indexes and optimize accordingly and you'll be set...

Also check that the column is not case sensitive.

Does this work?

Select Whatever from dbo.Table where SearchCol like '%c++%'

Why not simply call the job every 5 seconds and run only once per call?

Replicate by itself will never go over 8000.  The only work around is to use replicate more than once in the script.  I think it would be the simplest solution...

Have you looked for locks of even dead locks?

No reason for this to take more than a few minutes even on a slow machine.  ARe you sure you are not running a more complexe statement than this?

Can we see the query you are using?

I don't know any tools, but if you are in a hurry, you can always restore the db on a test server, then copy all needed objects to production!

Use EM / SSIS or drop the objects then rebuild. (you may use the EM to see what script must created, then copy paste so that you can run it...

One less gotcha to learn .