Buffering isn't something I've typically worried about. Are you selecting millions of records? If not, I wouldn't be concerned here. The default isolation works fine.

Replication was a little shaky in...

The insert will occur inside the clustered index, and if there is not enough space, a page split will occur.

This would be cumbersome in T-SQL. You'd be better off running SQL Trace and capturing all changes that way, replaying them against another copy of the database.

If only I had a shirt like that .....

It sounds like it might be stuck. Perhaps the connection was lost for some reason, or there's some OS item that's waiting on a response. I'd kill it and try...

GilaMonster (8/9/2010)

Thing is, he's not behaving that way out of ignorance. He's behaving that way because he wants...

Use configuration manager to set a specific port for the named instances, then enable the firewall, allow traffic through for those ports. Specify as listed above.

server, port

So this is a virtual SQL Server community? Or are we the architects working behind the scenes?

Ahhh, my head hurts on Monday morning.

Why do you think you need to shrink every night? I'd submit to you that you don't, and that you don't really understand the implications of doing that. you're also...

Use DBCC SHRINKFILE to reduce the size of the file. You need to leave free space immediately, as you want to reindex your tables as the shrink will fragment the...

Do you know what statistics are? They are a sampling of the table that tries to determine what the distribution of data is for that particular column. This helps the...

I'm not sure what The Thread is.

I tend to agree with Gail, but I'd look over the last few backups. How large are they? How much are they growing? Each one should be in the 150GB...

I'll post the file here. good luck.

Please post it on the T-SQL Challenges site.