The question had a typo that has been corrected. Points have been awarded back

I did see the 2nd goal by England. That was bad. 3 refs, none see the goal.

They ought to at least have 2 more, one at each goal.

I'll check and see, though I don't have a lot of hope something will be fixed today.

I'd do as Andrew suggested. Make a backup, archive it, then drop it. If you are really concerned, you can script out any logins that make use of this database...

You cannot restore downlevel. You cant' restore SQL SErver 2008 R2 to SQL Server 2008, you can't restore 2008 to 2005, 2005 to 2000, etc. The structures and database versions...

My sense of adventure is tempered by the desire to enjoy my life in places other than airplanes.

Plus I'm not sure it's worth it to me. I've skiied in Switzerland....

And here I have vacation scheduled for 2 weeks. Unfortunately heading to Vegas

I have had issues in the past, but I don't see a lot of issues reported in the last few versions of SQL Server.

tempdb is a shared resource, and...

Ha! 20 hours?!?!?! Not for me. I'm not thrilled with anything over 4 hours.

Plus aren't there all sorts of extra footsie ball fans clogging the country now?

Keyword here is connection. These are stable for the connection. @@identity doesn't scope to your connection or that table.

PASS. No interest in flying 64 hours to ski for a couple days.

Send me pix, I'm happy to wait for Oct here. I went Oct 25 last year.

The identity is not guarenteed to be unique. You can insert values into the identity column with SET IDENTITY_INSERT ON. They could possibly be duplicates.

Yes, yes, yes, though I'm afraid that will have to wait for a few months. I'll be looking to disappear...

David has a good list, but I'd also add in that you need a variety of skill levels in the team. There are always sh*t jobs, or boring jobs, and...

If I understand, you have replication running, moving data from 6 separate servers/instances to 1 (or 6) other servers?

Replication typically is fairly low load. Can you explain what isn't working?...