Wow, I wonder where I got that misinformation. Good to know. How would you recover a user database in that scenario?

This is just a hypothetical situation, fortunately. I had heard eons ago that SQL Server would shut itself down if it ran out of disk space. Is this an urban...

Thank you both. I found the issue. Our backup procedure was using Backup log @Database with truncate_only, which truncates the transaction log. Immediately after that it made a differential...

I thought I'd update this for posterity... I found the 2012 install to be pretty straghtforward, which was great. The features are slightly different on 2012 compared to 2008 so...

Mark, thanks for the info. You do have a lot of packages! I'll watch out for that.

Great, thanks so much. I was hoping there were no huge issues.

Wow, Charles, this is really helpful! I'll try it out and will post when I get the final answer.

Thanks, all for the tips!

Thanks, Sean, good point.

Charles, what do you mean by pre aggregate?

I would try to pre aggregate the two UseDate columns on the customer ID (for heavy) and the customerID and BillingCode (for fleet)....

There are no indexes on the Customer information, which is probably a major issue.

Indexes on fmtEquipmentStatus:

index_nameindex_descriptionindex_keys

fmtEquipmentStatus2clustered located on PRIMARYBillingCode

fmtEquipmentStatus3nonclustered located on PRIMARYEquipmentID, StatusEndDate, StatusStartDate

fmtEquipmentStatus4nonclustered located on PRIMARYEquipmentID, StatusEndDate, EquipmentRateCode, BillingCode

fmtEquipmentStatus5nonclustered...

I forgot to mention that this is an estimated execution plan, not the actual execution plan. It's on a production server, so I'm reluctant to run a query again that...

I've uploaded the execution plan. There's a Table spool that looks like it's returning over 14 million rows, which certainly is a problem. I just don't know how to...

Thanks, Perry, I appreciate the help! I'm going to have to do a lot of reading and testing on this... Off to work!

Thank you both for your replies! I thought that database snapshots might be the same as the snapshots used for replication but wasn't sure. Can the snapshot for replication be...

I'd look on Amazon for SQL Server 2008 beginners. Here's one series that I've heard great things about. I met him at a SQL Saturday and he's knowledgable and easy...