My guess is your database is in the full recovery model and you are not making log backups.

The short answer is that you should:

1. Backup the transaction log with truncate_only

2....

First physical drives matter. If you have 20 logical drives on the SAN that all are built on the same physical drives, you aren't helping.

You have to clarify what you...

A logical drive is a partition of a physical drive. It can be a complete partition of a drive or a partial partition.

A physical drive is where you determine performance....

It's a way for your to consume system data from a view, instead of having to parse results from sp_configure.

I assume you mean created 3 years ago or earlier. Lee's code should do that.

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...