Thanx Mark.  I'll play around with this in DEV.

Thanx to all for the nifty script ideas.  In the meantime, this is what I came up with, sort of fits in...

Lowell:

appreciate the script.  my other question would be how can I exclude certain SPIDS from this, based on loginame from sysprocesses?

I would want to exlcude by "loginame <>'process #'...

pretty slick John, never thought of using detach.  still, would be nice to have a script in my bag-o-tricks too.

I'll try the detach on DEV instance to get the...

Thanx much to all, this really helps out.

anyone have a suggestion for a good "how to" admin book?

BOL doesn't really provide the how to stuff, and being a newbie DBA...

finally found sp_spaceused <object name>

after only 35 minutes of hunting. BOL can really be frustrating sometimes.

How big is the particular DB, and what procs are running against it when your CHECKDB is invoked?  What's curious is the 2.5hrs for the repair_fast, which requires the DB...

the biggest issue then is the system DB's.

my main concern is Master, since it holds all the login info, and I want to avoid orphaning users.  suggestions there?  our thoughts...

yep, the link to MS Support just about covers it.

I would have missed the orphaned user bit, even though we went over that in 2072 class a month ago.

Thanx All!

concur with Martin.  we had a similar schedule, with integrity check and and index rebuilds AFTER full backup, so txnlog will show all that work, hence your burp.

recently rescheduled integrity/re-index before nightly full backup,...

Karl:

using select * from ::fn_dblog(null, null), from Northwind, this gives timestamp for checkpoint end.  is there a way to see the time stamps for all actions in the txnlog?

I'm not...

AJ:  do you not need to install a second named instance on same box or new instance on different box before restoring from Production (or some other instance) all the...

Thanx Much.  will look into 21 day book, as well as above text.

thanx for the info.  this text will work, assuming I know very little and pretty much need to start from scratch ??