Okay i was unaware of that thanks for sharing the solution and I am glad that you managed to get your problem solved.

Local system account in special account just for SQL server to run, it is a powerful account that should have admin rights to all the folders.

Ideally you should use...

Sorry, I meant the account that is running SQL server needs to have permissions to the folder.

are you running SQL server on a domain account ?

Also SSIS holds the ETL world record of loading 1TB of data in under 30 minutes, would like to see your developers try to match this performance ...

does the account that you are running sql service under have write permissions to that folder?

have a look at the actual execution plans of the different queries, this should show what is causing the difference.

you should really be using select statements for your SQL server sources rather than using table access so you can add the Select Dinstinct or Group by there...

No worries,

its an excellent product, also you may want to have a look at their data-compare tool for promoting the data from dev to production

it creates the scripts for you, just click on the Synchornization Wizard button you can save the scripts or apply them through the tool

have a look at redgates SQL compare, it will do all this with ease. I think there is a trial version on their website

Yes looking at it again i don't think would help you sorry, i guess the issue is that you are trying to change the primary key and the...

yes the lack of the sql agent is a problem, however you can use t-sql to create the backups and then use windows scheduler to schedule your backups.

Have you considered SQL Server Express editition, it is also free and you will integrate nicely into a Full SQL server environment. However there is a 4gig limit...

I think i understand the issue, in order to prevent the repliaction agent from incrementing the column when it does an insert use the NOT FOR REPLICATION option

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms152529.aspx

t-sql to get db size

for one db

SELECT [NAME] ,(Size * 8 /1024) AS SizeMB FROM sys.database_files

for all dbs

SELECT [NAME] ,(Size * 8 /1024) AS SizeMB FROM sys.master_files