If you are talking about the number of dots in the password field, that is just a bit of security through obfuscation. It displays the same number of dots...

Is the srcsafe.ini file a per user thing or is there only one? I ask because of the context in which xp_cmdshell executes (i.e. using the SQL Server service...

As above, the restore process will create the database files (if they don't exist).

A caveat: if you are restoring over an existing database (for whatever reason), it is better to...

This has come across rather confusingly and it's hard to make out exactly what your setup is.

The Windows account used by the service will need sa rights in SQL Server...

My tool of choice for this sort of thing is SQLPing 3 from http://www.sqlsecurity.com/Tools/FreeTools/tabid/65/Default.aspx

You'll be wanting the version I did for my SQL 2000 servers then. 😉

[font="Courier New"]DECLARE @name sysname,

@sql nvarchar(4000),

...

It will if he doesn't want the server to halt due to lack of disk space! 😛

May I suggest that you don't let your programmers create things on the production servers?

Or if they must, they only get the rights to do so when required,...

Attached is a script I was using for a while (drop the .txt extension when you implement it, natch). You can either create a scheduled task in the Windows...

Can your virtual machines actually see each other at all? Simple ping test will verify that in short order.

What ports are the various instances listening on? You will...

You're getting into audit table territory here. Running a DML AFTER trigger to insert old and new data into audit tables. Which can take up a lot...

It doesn't take much time to install & run. How much of a penny-pincher (or minute-pincher as it were) is your boss?

It is worth running at least once. ...

1) That is correct. The transaction log backup will capture the committed transactions to the backup file/media and remove them from the log file (in other words, truncating...

As stated in BOL:

"The CREATE PROCEDURE statement cannot be combined with other Transact-SQL statements in a single batch."

You need to do something like this:

[font="Courier New"]IF OBJECT_ID ( N'dbo.spCoverageLog' ) IS...

There are a number of considerations:

- number of secondary files

- use of filegroups

- placement of files on physical disks

- placement of data within the files (e.g. splitting indexes from tables,...