There is no benefit. A logical drive is an administrative item in Windows.

I would not think it would continue to hold a lock from that statement, but as Luke mentioned, it depends on what else is happening in the procedure.

It doesn't mean anything. You need to enable logging in the maintenance plan and then examine the text file log. The SQL Agent log is useless.

You typically do not "open" system tables, especially in SSMS since that is an editing window.

Most of the information from system tables appears in SSMS. What exactly are you trying...

That happened to me as well, Grant. Had to email them to get it fixed. took about a day.

I'd second Lee that a test/QA database likely will be fine in simple mode.

It's not broken, but I think it could be enhanced. Clean the look and feel, add tags, etc.

There's one more coming (at least).

Nice job, Andy! It's gotten me to think a bit more about how to test things ahead of time, and plan for testing.

It might be trying to read the tape headers as well.

I would suggest you not send to tape directly. Send to disk, use NTBackup to throw to tape.

The only good method I've seen so far is to source control the DDL scripts (maybe DML deployment as well).

As soon as you allow GUI changes, things easily get out...

Honestly I'd be surprised that you'd actually go back more than a few days from disk. Beyond that you'd likely be looking at tape. Also, if you are dependent on...

Pradeep has good ideas, but this is rather complicated. You might want to hire someone to help you get this going.

You have two needs. Synchronizing databases, which requires some level...

Do you mean when you run a query from SSMS? Remember that SQL Server is a server, it doesn't typically interact with a client desktop.

You need a client program to...

Good to hear! look for the robot in future strips.

That's one of the things I've been concerned about, as I agree with Jeff on Barry's posts.

I wouldn't mind seeing some "voting" to help people decide what is good, but...