Yep; afraid I'm not all that familiar with Crystal Reports either, but with SQL Server you essentially have two choices:-

Your DBA will either grant access to the relevant database to...

Glad you got it sorted.

There's a bunch of stuff to look at here, if I'm reading your post correctly.

Who administers this instance of SQL? In other words, do you have a DBA that looks...

Just a couple of thoughts to add:-

1. No-one has added some maintenance tasks that you didn't know about, have they? Perhaps an ill-advised statistics rebuild just before your index rebuild...

An alternative point of view regarding file locations:-

Unless organisational standards dictate otherwise, I tend to leave Master, Model and MSDB in the default installation locations.

I do however, unless sternly told...

JoshDBGuy (2/26/2015)

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I've always created "temporary" (not really temporary) tables, or used dev/test databases to test performance. It's not perfect but you can easily see whether a clustered index will increase...

I must admit I too would expect a single IP address but different ports for each instance.

Could you get back to us on that?

To support what's already been said, this really is a massive question and relies heavily on the organisation you're currently working for.

As a contractor I like to think that I...

Not quite what I was expecting you to find, but well done!

Enjoy the rest of your day.

How specific was your Profiler Trace? It's normally pretty good at trapping stuff like this, although you've not given us any detail on the size of the database, likely throughput,...

Even with 2008R2 we seemed to get better performance natively than with LiteSpeed - LiteSpeed really saved us with SQL 2000 and 2005, but the day we got 2008R2 -...

You haven't discussed the disk technology that is in place on your backup server yet.

SAN, RAID, SSD?

Disk controllers in good shape and all running - no battery problems?

The other posters...