I would think that building the index on compressed data would take a bit longer due to the compress/decompress (higher cpu utilization).

The queries against them should take a comparable amount...

Try this out. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb510489.aspx

That completely depends on what you want SQL Server to do should it stop running for some reason. I have mine set to attempt to restart every time to...

I agree. Formatting the display on the UI is the best way. It provides more flexibility than if you do the formatting in T-SQL.

Every visual development environment I...

I am thinking you are accessing the server via SSMS from a different box than the one with SQL Server installed. If this is the case, you need to...

It sounds as if someone made some changes to permissions on the domain account. One common issue is the domain account password expiring. If this is the case,...

This is an SQL database server forum, not an operating system forum.

However, there are two Administrator groups. You could be only a member of a machine's Administrator group and...

In SSMS, open the Properties page for the server. On the Security tab/screen, change Server authentication to SQL Server and Windows Authentication mode. Click OK, and then restart...

This is an article that presents options that you can try.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc768544(v=sql.100).aspx

That really depends upon the type of partitioning, and what the data is partitioned on.

I would assume that either access method would perform similar if the partitioning was done to...

It sounds like you may be having trouble with the DAC upgrade process. Here is a link that may help.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee635209.aspx

How are you importing the data? If you use SSIS, you can set a value in place of the NULLs on the way through and not even worry about...

That depends on how the filters work. If they create a T-SQL statement, you could create a varchar(max) column, or state a suitable size, and put the query in...

Profiler is not available on the Express edition. If you have a Standard or Enterprise edition anywhere else on the network you can use the profiler provided with that.

SQL 2008, right?

Don't elevate the user permissions. As you already know, the DBA's won't like it and a security audit will probably ding you for it.

Instead use EXECUTE AS...