What are you using to export? DTS or BCP?? Is the excel file huge or different file?

Exactly what I was thinking. Good luck filling that position

It's a performance hit. If your asking weather or not a shrink will corrupt your DB, the answer is no. You should go back and suggest running the shrink once...

Change the deletes to 22 hours old. I've run into issues where it won't delete the backups because it run a second earlier then it did last night.

I've run into wierd security errors when using linked server. You know the security is correct in the DB's and within the linked server properties? Double check. I'm embarassed to...

You have an orphaned transaction, the only way I know how to get rid of these spids is to stop and start SQL.

I agree with Ten. Once those scripts are passed from the deveolper to the DBA group to run in QA or Prod, they are now your responsiblity. If you schedule...

Another thing, Text plans differ from database to database:

Here's the plan for the slow running query:

  |--Compute Scalar(DEFINE[Expr1024]=If (substring('Gross      ', 1, 6)='Gross ') then...

FYI, the case statement I refer to is the one in the IN statement.

I was looking at that a little while ago. Your right, it is a different query. Anyway, why would changing the alais (commenting out the statement give the same results)...

It doesn't seem to be server related, hardware. I can restore a database from the servers that are running OK on to the test server and it runs fine and...

Yeah, sorry, column name. INDEXES are identical, the stats have been updated on both servers nightly. I'm concerned about the fully qualified name vs alais. Why would this make a difference,...