We're not changing from InstantForum. Keep in mind that what you've seen as breakage, there are plenty of people that see improvements. We don't get to pick/choose specific features.

Maybe moving the "Older" versions to a single forum with the 2 subforums for each makes sense. I'm thinking that anything older than 2014 is "older". So we'd have 2017,...

Interesting. I'd guess there's some sort of padding or overhead, as Phil noted. Maybe try a few different known sizes and see? I'll try to load a few as well.

Yeah, I'm not interested in doing that. Definitely need something to occupy my days.

Feel free to chime in here: http://community.instantasp.co.uk/18923/Add-tags-for-topics

Not possible. At least not short term. Tags would be better, IMHO, but either is a fairly intrusive change to this forum code.

It might be possible to have a sysadmin login that didn't have rights to start the service. Starting SQL Server is a Windows level function, not something inside of SQL...

Here you go. Use a CASE. Also, use DATETIME2 and SYSDATETIME(). Always assign a date variable, then use the current date as a default. This let's you test, and reuse...

What does Datalength() show?

Ha ha. No,...

I have wanted "tags" easily allowed, with the versions as prominent, easily clicked items. Maybe I'll ask the InstantForum people if they can add this.

It could be that you have OE or some other dialog with a lock. I've seen that. Sometimes disconnecting in SSMS (OE + windows) helps.

As mentioned above, you need to understand what's happening.

SSMS is a client app. The SQL Server itself will have a name like those you've given. Note that you...

You need a calendar table. Build one, stick it in a dba database, query it to run. You could even add flags for days and holidays. Makes life much simpler.

I'll also add that I've worked on lots of systems that trundled along at 8% CPU and few IOPS all day long. Those systems could be written with cursor processing...