Start with the 70-431 exam. It's for the basic certification and it's a general one.

Pick up a book on the exam, and go through it, working through the exercises. You...

The questions has been corrected, and typos do slip through.

The idea isn't to trick you, but help you learn something about SQL Server. There are multiple ways to move...

There are no databases that have Autoclose set?

Very strange. Have you tried Profiling around that time, looking for something strange?

Can you DBCC INPUTBUFFER the SPID when that occurs?

This is a very open ended question.

you might start here: http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Performance+Tuning+and+Scaling/indexcreationguidelines/1389/

Clustered indexes (only 1 per table) are good for range queries.

Nonclustered are good for seeks to specific rows.

You generally...

What do you mean reduce duplication?

Litespeed (and Red Gage/Hyperbac) perform compression, which involves some tokens and pattern replacement, just like ZIP files.

Litespeed, and the other vendors, provide utilitis to uncompress...

The MDF specification isn't available. This is meant to be read by the SQL Server service only. To extract tables, you'd connect to the SQL Server service and select them...

There are a number of DMVs that can get you server information. You can start here: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/database/Dynamic_Management_Views.aspx

Which new table? Replication is by publication, so if you create a new table, you need a new replication publication.

Usually you'll find if there's a network glitch, the backup will fail. I almost never run the backup across the network. run it locally and copy it.

nope, backup, detach, uninstall, reinstall.

sp_help_revlogin to save logins.

I don't think this is allowed directly. Maybe with a UDF?

I'd think that something must have changed. If not, the DBCC shouldn't have doubled.

One thing to note, that checkdb includes a checkcatalog and checktable. Paul Randal has a series on...

Check the snapshot.sys.users to see what's mapped there and see if you have unmatched SIDs.

Or run sp_change_users_login with the reporting option.

Should work, and there are some new tools from Microsoft to help check for SQL Injection.

http://blogs.msdn.com/sqlsecurity/archive/2008/06/24/microsoft-source-code-analyzer-for-sql-injection-june-2008-ctp.aspx

Short answer, no.

You can check sp_msforeachtable, but that doesn't cover columns.