I'm a little confused about what you mean by the awards and then the two approaches. Can you post a bit of sample data and explain how you see the...

I'd go with what pradeep has suggested.

I think certifications *could* help, but they don't, at least not as they're configured. They'd need to be more practical, with a variety of things to solve.

However Jay has a...

Yep, at about 16 months, just learned to walk, started to dance, hasn't slowed down in 7 more years 😀

OK, I'm confused, are you writing the query in Access?

It's not clear what linked servers you have, and where you are querying. If the tables are in Access, then you...

Wow, excellent information. Ed, you need to write this up as a short article!

Do you mean the same backup to 2 locations (having a copy), or striped as in 1/2 on one drive, 1/2 on another?

Either way, running a backup to a remote...

Just to be clear, you should not be regularly running shrinks. This is for emergencies only. Keep free space in your files to handle normal operations.

We have been debating about starting a sister site here for Oracle. Good to know there's a call for it.

You can see some of Mr. Denny's work at SearchSQLServer and we link to his articles here at times.

I think most of these books will work. Just be sure that...

Then only chance for determining this if it's not in the logs is using a log reader. I'm not sure if this is logged, but for 2000 you can download...

There aren't any tables? What are the views of?

Note that you perform these operations on the virtual node, not either instance. If you do that, most things work across both nodes.

Note that as mentioned above, there is only...

You can't schedule more often than every minute, can you? At least in SQL Agent.

Every 2 seconds sounds quite often. I'd be tempted to run this as a job, but...

First, be aware that you want to have free space in your database files. These are not Excel or Word files. Free space is needed for data growth.

Second, is this...