Also, would using a table hint (i.e., updlock, serializable, etc.) be beneficial? Or is changing the transaction isolation level (i.e., serializable) and/or query statement order be sufficient?

Thanks!

Would there be any noticeable differences with regards to locking behavior? If identical concurrent transactions (either #1 or #2) were running, would one transaction be better or worse then the...

Grant,

That makes sense. However, I think I was unclear in my initial problem description. Here are the current file sizes for tempdb:

tempdb.mdf = 261GB

tempdb.ldf = 512MB

The log file isn't the...

Grant,

I guess I'm unclear. To detect the causes of tempdb growth, I was going to shrink the tempdb back to 10gb and start monitoring at that point (via suggestions provided...

Grant,

Why would it be necessary to be in full recovery mode and doing a log backup before shrinking? Wouldn't SQL Server just throw an error if processes are currently using...

I'm running SQL Server 2005 SP2.

The tempdb stopped growing at 260GB. However, I'm planning to shrink down the tempdb and hopefully catch the culprits.

Wouldn't using stored procedures add another step in the deletion process? If foreign key constraints are already checked, wouldn't it be faster to just do the deletion at that time?

Or...

Thanks everyone for your input.

I still had a couple of unanswered questions:

1. Is updating statistics an "independent task"? In other words, can it be done before or after a full...

Sameer,

I had a couple of follow up questions:

1. For a daily maintenance routine, should I do anything besides just the full db backup? Check db integrity?

2. Is updating statistics an...