Wouldn't you want to do that the other way?  That is, find rows where the previous row matches the next row -- i.e. no column changed -- so you could...

Use MS's free tool "tablediff.exe" and let them do this work for you, and fully tested already!  Unfortunately quirky to get working initially, but works well after that, and it's...

I didn't have any data to test with, but I'm reasonably sure my sort order is correct.  As I think you've since discovered, the rows get out of order outside...

;WITH cte_EarliestShowDates AS (
  SELECT Show, MIN(Date) AS EarliestShowDate
  FROM dbo.TableName
  GROUP BY Show
)
SELECT TN.*
FROM dbo.TableName TN
INNER JOIN cte_EarliestShowDates CESD...

Cluster...

When you add the keyword, you're probably preventing the physical shrinking.  If you really want to shrink, just shrink:

DBCC SHRINKFILE (N'prod1', 0)

I wouldn't use 0 personally...

set ansi_nulls off 
I'm trying to find a way to avoid having to use isnull() or coalesce() everywhere in my script in order to avoid counterintuitive null comparison results...

I swear I posted this already (somewhere at least!, another SQL help site perhaps?), but I'll post it here too just in case:

SELECT EmployeeInformationID, COUNT(*)...

Although not considered "standard", I prefer this approach because (1) the FETCH only has to be written once (can't count the number of times someone changes only one FETCH when...

Rather than repeatedly having to identity the post code, add an AFTER INSERT, UPDATE trigger that finds the post code and then store its byte location and length in a...

The way I read it, you could have letters on both the front and the back of the string.  This CASE code handles that situation as well:

[code...