If the indices are very fragmented then an index rebuild will generally reduce the number of used pages in your database somewhat, because it will compact your indices (and data...

You can attach a read-only database, but a database in standby mode is a different sort of read-only because it has an "undo file" associated with it.

I think it's that...

One way to do this would be to use the db_name() function. You don't need elevated privileges to run it either.

I've only done very limited testing with this, but...

An OS error 5 is "access denied".

When you run a bulk insert statement you're running it in the context of the service account under which SQL Server is running. ...

There's two ways I've got around similar issues in the past.

One way is to detach the suspect database then do the restore, but it sounds like that may not work...

Seeing as your existing boxes are very lightly used then you should get a big win from consolidating.

One thing you will run into though is memory issues. Even though...

A shared lock will block a write to the same resource. If your Select is taking a table lock then noone will be able to write (Insert, Update or...

If the database is in Full recovery then the log file size is a bit harder to predict because transactions will remain in the log file until it is flushed,...

From what you're saying it sounds like the data is only changed by the nightly refresh. If that is true I would set the database to Simple recovery and...

You could use a command like the following to create a backup script then execute the resultant script:

select 'backup database ' + name + ' to disk = ''D:\BackupDir\' +...

Shrinking in smaller chunks seems almost like a cursor solution. I've never considered it and I can't think of a situation where I would consider it. Sure the...

If you really do need to reboot the server I'd recommend running something to stop database activity immediately prior to the reboot.

If I want to kick all users out of...

How did you create the table in the test database? I'm guessing you used the "select into" method, and so let the table be created in the background. ...

If you can't get an outage you're going to have real problems with managing locking/blocking.

One way of doing it would be to search for the first duplicate then delete all...

One observation. You're making a backup copy of the original table and then another copy of the table which you use as the dedup source. Seeing as you're...