Perhaps, really this is a row by row operation, checking for a change in the first column, and if there isn't one, rewriting it with a blank.

I'll put out a...

You can't do this in T-SQL, or not in any way that would make sense for a report. Typically the front end for your reporting would ignore the repetitions. How...

SSMS is SQL Server Management Studio. That's correct.

I think the confusion is that SSMS should be the source for verifying how things are set. Not necessarily the registry as you...

SSMS is not a free tool. It's the tool built by MS and designed to connect to and manage SQL Server. It's installed as part of the client tools, and...

It's likely causing issues. SQL allows many characters in object names, some of which cause issues in other products, or in things like XML documents.

I can't explain the registry, and honestly you're not supposed to muck in there. The SSMS tool reads the registry, but it may be reading a different place than you're...

This seems more like production database administrator to me. Keeping dbs up, tuning them, that's production work.

Gus has a great point. You can't expect anyone else to challenge a legal issue for you.

However if you want to challenge it, what's the likelihood that your DBA will...

Yes, however you want the virtuals on separate physical servers if this is a production server.

also , be sure you have good IO. If you are making two VMs and...

It looks like you're barely shrinking it. What's the file size on disk? I might try to shrink it closer to the 13 or 14GB

Chicken thread for the soul?

The Threadinator?

I suspect this one will never get caught.

There's always a security tab for 2005 instances. You select the server instance, right click, properties. The dialog that appears has choices on the left. Security is one of those.

I haven't seen it either, but it looks like security. Can you run a DIR from that server (using xp_cmdshell or the service account)?

also, backups to network drives are a...

You should have credit now. Let me know if that's not the case.

It's the recovery model, and you would find this in the database properties, option tab.

From T-SQL,

SELECT DATABASEPROPERTYEX('msdb','Recovery')