Ohh, forgot to say thanks much !

Yes, that worked perfectly, just what I was looking for.

Brilliant strategy going for the char(63) string.

Well done!

Pankaj, thanks for the suggestion, but I already tried it. Didn't work.

fyi..starting tomorrow (1-1-10), I'll be out of the office for two weeks and will not be able...

I'm going to take a shot at this.... I believe you need to rebuild all your indexes first, then shrink. The reason being is because SQL Server tables...

yes, you did, and more eloquently than I. sorry to reiterate, sorry to reiterate.

I believe as soon as you take a Snapshot of your mirrors or have any DB in a readable state, (whether you are using them or not) you are now...

and of course, you cannot read the mirrors, you would have to take a Database Snapshot of each to report on it. (or some other copy).

If you ever want to see what's actually on the backup File you can use the following:

Restore FILELISTONLY from disk='path\file'

(this will show you all the files listed in this backup)

or

Restore...

Jason Miller's script (using master_files) returns NULLS in the InUse, Avail..,%Free columns for all files that are not current database. ???

forfiles /p "...full path..." /m "*.pdf" /d -3 /c "CMD /c del @FILE"

I put this in a job and schedule it to run at SQL Server startup. I then get notified any time the node fails and what node it is...

Mayne the user didn't get matched up with the login.

Go to Security - Login and look at the porperties for the login and see if the user database is checked...

I've seen a lot of debate about this issue in my previous shop as well as my current shop. I come from the school that says these are TOOLS....

Just an alternative not yet mentioned, we have a 3rd party tool - APEX SQLLog reader. It will read your active or backups of your transaction log and tell...

this appears to be for SQL 2000 or below. You cannot update system tables in SQL 2005 or above.

The best article on this subject is from Gail...