If a tree falls in the forest ...

Kenneth, I think you're splitting hairs. It's not enabled, meaning able to be used until you reconfigure.

Wow, 14 days is a lot, but if you need it, or feel comfortable, then use it.

If you are post SP2, then the maintenance plan has a checkbox for "first...

From what I've heard, the same features in 2005 Standard will be there in 2008 standard. The document, however, is misleading.

There isn't a good way to do this. If people have Enterprise Manager and a login, they can look at the tables in the database.

Why can't they see the columns?

By timestamp do you mean the date and time of the last transaction? Wouldn't it be the timestamp on the file?

Search here in the scripts section. There are lots of backup scripts that can probably do this.

Note that they will require the xp_cmdshell for the most part, and that's not...

I'm not as concerned about SQL Server on a VM. I have friends doing it and it can be done, but you have to understand it's a shared resource. First...

you can't answer more than once 🙂

Yes you should do it and if there are errors, you need to be alerted. most of the time errors are hardware problems and you need to fix them.

I don't...

A "hot backup" usually means taking a backup without shutting down the server. When you run a backup in SQL Server, it's a hot backup. A "warm backup" typically means...

SSPI is a security error with Windows Auth. It can be a number of things. Try these links:

support.microsoft.com/kb/811889

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/FindPost10251.aspx

It's April Fool's, but it's a good idea. Who wouldn't like a HALO or Gears of War game tarketing Oracle DBAs or databases!!!

Don't forget to play some jokes on those...

Remember if you run this from your SSMS, it'son the server, it's the server path, NOT your workstation path. You can't get to your workstation path from a server, unless...

Michael is right, but I'd also think about separating the logs from the data onto separate spindles (logs - sequential access, data-random), or even tempdb onto separate spindles since it's...

note that you need to ORDER BY this identity column to get rows back in numerical order. By default SQL Server does not guarantee row ordering, regardless of what order...