Transcender used to be a good prep area. There was some talk that they were breaking NDA by paying people for actual exam questions, however I don't think they were...

You can't take a single table backup, per se. You can export a table using the export wizard or BCP.

And for the gamers, I got this in the mail from Mom:

The B1 Basic module and C2 Advanged, Ghost Tower of Inverness 🙂

It is amazing. If Mr. White wants to, I would republish it.

Jack answered already for livemeeting. We use gotowebinar (Citrix) at RG, which IMHO, doesn't work as well.

I assume you want specifics. Lots of script libraries, but here are a few I've found helpful:

Backups : http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/Backup+%2f+Restore/62380/

Help shrink t-log: http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/30026/

Monitoring http://sqlblog.com/blogs/adam_machanic/archive/2009/03/30/who-is-active-v8-40-now-with-delta-power.aspx

I saw that from Brent. Paul is garnering lots of respect from the other gurus.

We need to get Paul out here in the US for some event 🙂

Or if this is your local machine and you need debugging, or it's a dev server, enable those ports in the firewall.

A few links for you:

http://blog.nahurst.com/visual-guide-to-nosql-systems

http://adamblog.heroku.com/past/2009/7/6/sql_databases_dont_scale/

I think consistency can be the big issue. You can't necessarily make decisions if you can't be sure of your data being correct on any...

SSIS will move this data without intermediate tables.

I'd follow Mr. Turner's suggestions as well

Is there a question here?

As far as the restore, YOU do not issue a command against that file. You issue a command to the SQL Server, and it must access OS resources to perform...

This has nothing to do with your permissions. The permissions must be granted for the service account running SQL Server.

I guess it can be less flexible, but it's more reliable. What flexibility do you need?

Both Idera, and Red Gate (I work for Red Gate), have options to help with recovery with their Virtual Database and Virtual Restore (respectively) products.