If I read the initial post correctly the interview is with Microsoft?

If yes, you may want to Google for "Microsoft interview" - there's tons of stuff out there - basically...

Are you trying to do this with a scheduled job? If yes, you need to take a look at the SQL Server Agent account not the SQL Server account......

Depending on the % of the data you're deleting from your database you may find that it's actually faster to select the data you do want to keep into new...

Though I believe its' best to know the details of your SAN an alternative would be to ask the storage folks to provide SLA(s) for storage performance, uptime and whatever...

However the "synch" is being accomplished may be the cause of your problems - for example if you're shipping a full backup of the database and restoring it on the...

Multicore processors will typically improve performance on most servers somewhat - but not as much as a 2nd, 3rd, 4th physical processor.

Given the current state of affairs in the server...

A couple of questions:

(1) How are you enforcing the "no duplicates" rule? In the database via a constraint (e.g. unique index) or in your VB application?

(2) Are...

Hmm... your error isn't really related to a "linked server" as the term usually applies. You're dynamically creating a connection to an excel spreadsheet on a UNC...

There's something about...

"You are not likely to run into errors from adding procedures to the master database"... umm, maybe/maybe not. Master is a system database and effectively belongs to MS -...

These errors look suspiciously like errors from a monitoring tool rather than SQL Server errors...?

Any chance you're trying to do your insert via a stored procedure that has not been updated to accept a varchar value as of yet?

Sounds like somebody may have created a schema in your database and mucked with the permissions... are you dbo (db_owner) of the database in question?

In EM does the table have...

You can run/execute the same stored procedure, using either a client application as described or multiple jobs (e.g. job a starts every minute a :01, job b at :10, job...

If you've disabled builtin admins and your account is not either a member of another group that does have permission to the SQL server or the login has been granted...

Found something worth a read on Salva Ok's blog - as always, there are caveats to altering default SQL Server settings...

http://blogs.msdn.com/slavao/archive/2006/11/13/q-a-does-sql-server-always-respond-to-memory-pressure.aspx

He's got some very good articles about memory...