goodguy -

You've come to the right place for advice and it sounds like you're making some good progress at this point.

However, the one question that I just have to ask...

Sounds like you just made yourself one great argument for a tool that will compare the schemas of two databases, show you the differences and then script the necessary changes.

There...

My money would be on "not" but my guess is that you're probably obligated to make a go of it. I'm actually responding to two of Randy's posts here...

Without knowing a whole lot more about your environment, data, requirements, etc. it's pretty much impossible for anybody to provide an opinion... which is probably why you haven't seen any...

One caveat on the sharepoint database typically not being a big resource hog - when Sharepoint kicks off a crawl of it's content databases it's a HUGE hog, the rest...

I recently had an experience with Windows Vista x64 that really brought my attention to this particular issue - who in the hell has the time/knowledge to slipstream? The...

Ben -

Just a couple of thoughts based on your previous comments, it sounds like you're currently programattically generating 30K+ individual insert statements which will be pretty slow no matter what....

You cite the developers needing access to production to troubleshoot issues as the reason they need access... key question, do they need access the rest of the time? If...

Umm... not quite sure what...

A couple of thoughts/points to explore as your backup is failing with "unexpected network error occurred" which can be caused by a wide variety of issues:

(1) Other network activity...

I'll echo Steve here - the only true/provable test of a backup is to restore it periodically - I can't count the number of times that I've found backups to...

A quick note -

Red Gates tools are for comparing differences between databases, SQL Compare for structure, SQL Data Compare for Data.

Beyond Compare for comparing files in a file system, no...

A quick comment about the importance of IT within the "business" - many articles I've read attempt to force IT into the position of "critical, strategic asset", but quite frankly...

Hmm... I wonder if taking an axe to your system databases would pretty much end any chance of support from PSS, etc. when everything comes tumbling down.

Possible consequences of...

An additional comment on this one:

Virtualization is not necessarily used just to "slice up" an underutilized machine, it can also be used to break the dependency on physical hardware allowing...