It could be a disk issue, then. It isn't a large database, so even on a workstation, it shouldn't take that long. If you run an ad hoc backup, is...

There are complicated ways, but honestly I'd just use a dates table, since then you can account for holidays, weekend work, etc. in that table. I'd actually use the dates...

Often there's some OS error, maybe file not available or something like that, which causes suspect mode. The error log often pinpoints this, so post the error, as suggested above,...

Is the job still doing something? Is it still running or is it running for 12 hours continuously?

I'd run a trace to be sure that something didn't get hung up...

There's not enough information here. What was the difference between the scenarios or was this just two different tests?

I could guess that the first time it's possible that your secondary...

You need a subquery to get the top 5. You could use a CTE as well or a view.

Basically get the top 5 records

select top 5 xx from table yyyyy...

What's the Error number? It sounds like a hardware issue on your system. are backups completing?

The log size also depends on how often you run log backups.

If I can generate 100MB of logs in a day from my database, if I backup every hour, I...

I'm not sure what calculation you are looking for here. 3 and 4 give either 125% or 75%, how do you calculate 57%?

If you can give the algorithm, we can...

There also won't be a deleted table on an insert. Be sure that's the behavior you are looking for.

Do you mean new data inserted into a table? There isn't really an "append" in SQL Server. You have no ideas where the rows physically live, so there isn't a...

Is this a LIKE search?

I'm not sure you'll get faster than full-text. I suppose you could try some type of hash, but that might not work better. Perhaps breaking into...

If you add a NEWID() column to your select and then order by it, you'll get some pseudo random results.

DMO/SMO is what you need to examine. You can create a handle to a SQL Server object and then perform various actions.

A few resources:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms162169.aspx

http://www.eggheadcafe.com/PrintSearchContent.asp?LINKID=259

varchar(max) is recommended as text will go away. It doesn't affect your use of SSMS.

you can change the limits, but not sure if they'll get above 65k. Why do you...