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As far as patching / updating the servers is concerned,...

You will have to take the output from readerrorlog in to a temporary table and then perform the date time comparison.

Have you looked at the logs to see if there is any error or information in there?

Windows 2008 is a lot more restrictive (sometimes to the point of being annoying) where security is concerned. You seem to be taking a backup in the default folder. Users...

You can delete the data from the table which has the foreign key or you can disable constraint checks and then delete.

So it really depends on your database design.

The growth of the log size would depend on how many records are deleted. You can limit the impact on the system and the log file by deleting in batch....

It seems, like most historical data, your data serves a reporting function. If the current data is part of an OLTP, I would probably look to move the historical data...

This should help you get started

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/tags/TDE

Moreover, if you really need to delete data based on some criteria you could do it in smaller batches using the ROWCOUNT statement. However, you need to keep in mind...

Does your 350 GB database have historical data? If so, is all the historical data being accessed all the time? Have you considered partitioning?

Are you currently having any performance...

Like mentioned above, you could log any attempt to drop tables and completely restrict dropping of tables. It depends on what your requirements are.

Why not write the output of the scripts to a file and review after implementation. The output could include both DDL and DML.

You could have timestamp appended to the output...

The only time I've seen something like this automated is while using a file editor which had an option to make a backup of the file before opening it.

Are you...

What purpose is this report going to serve?

I think it had to do with the order in which I did this. For future reference -

1. Enabled PAE / 3GB which ever applicable or both (boot.ini)

2. Provide Lock...