excellent point about the nowait on raiserror fellas, I had forgotten about that feature.

They are buffered and will squirt out when the buffer is full or the process terminates.

If you must have these "messages" received at critical points during a long running procedure...

the "go" will not work inside a begin - end. begin end is only valid for the current batch.

do something like this:

use databaseb

go

if exists(select 1 from master.sys.databases where...

I think your proposed solution should be fine. Just do something like this:

if exists(select ............)

begin

-----

----- Your SQL statements

-----

end

This sounds like a homework problem.

I am not trying to be mean, really, but you are paid (I assume) to solve these kinds of basic query problems. Try to reason...

The short answer is no. You will have to quiesce your application to insure no writes are taking place.

You can put the database in read only mode, but I...

Backup and restore is a consistent way to get a copy of a database. While a few transactions my ultimately be rolled back when the database is recovered at the...

Not sure what you mean by a "checklist" or even "pre-migration".

In my experience there really isn't all that much to worry about in terms of migrating databases from...

creating a temp table like; select * into #temptable is not the same as:

create table tempdb.dbo.temptable ( column1 int )

You cannot select from sysobjects in master database unless you...

You have other issues then because a user on one database does not automatically have access to other databases unless they are sysadmin, where they have access to everything. ...

The profound ugliness of that query is somewhat of an indication of possible issues of underlying design problems which always lead to performance problems when the volume increases.

Someone who knows...

Such a role already exists: db_owner. Basically, you need to do the following:

1. create a login for the user(s) to log in with. Recommend Windows integrated security if possible.

2....

what about tempdb... are the files configured the same and on the same spindles on both servers (instances)? What about memory... is the same amount of RAM allocated to each?...

select datediff(hour,getdate(),getutcdate())

tells you how many hours the local time zone differs from UTC. Once you know that you can use dateadd() with any datetime column or vriable to get it...

statistic should be the same. What about the servers themselves, are they roughly the same in terms of hardware and disks?

I am saying this because a plan that was complied...