XP is by far the best OS Microsoft has ever released from a stability and usability perspective.  I do have Vista on 2 and 1/2 computers (I'll explain the 1/2 in a...

Forget performance.  What is the requirement? 

Design 1 is a many to many tie between customers and addresses. 

design 2 is 1 to many

You many even need to get more...

Which exact product are you using?  Veritas Backup Exec?  If so, Michael is correct.  If you are taking some sort of disk image snapshot (which probably will be useless) then...

That is not the same as what you origionally posted.  That is ALL orders that match the 3 most recent days on which any number of orders was posted.  So...

Slightly Differerent than Peters

However, I have to ask, are you sure your's gives you what you really want? 

SELECT DISTINCT a.Teller_ID

I agree with John.  You are using a relational data to hold flat file style data. 

If 90% of the time you need the csv data, then create an indexed view...

Buy something.  There are very good tools out there to track what you are asking for historically. 

Idera and Quest both do that very well.   To track performance data you have...

I don't think that the indexes are the issue here, but the system table sysindexes that is of issue.  However, dropping and adding the indexes that it references "may" clean...

State?  Not sure the interviewer knew the answer either.  I would ask for clairification on the point. 

Error state?  Message?  Data integrity?

Data would be the same as it was before...

I agree that 25 min in my opinion is fairly respectible.  A trick to getting the count.

select @RowCount=max(rowcnt

And what is with these restrictions?  Sounds like homework to me   No temp tables?  In any case you have your answer.

Can't you tell Jeff.  Apparently all of your posts are invisible to him.

Agree with your point completely.  On the note of the...

We are using Backup Exec, but with windows authentication.  Haven't tried SQL Server authentication.

They just released rollup 3 (3186) I also have 3175 and had good luck but I am about to look at Rollup 3 instead. 

the delete will cause a read on all child tables to verify that you are not deleting a required parent.

Because of this you can get some very strange locking behavior.  ...