Or full backups once per week and nightly differentials.

Are you staggering the times that they each get copied / applied?

I pretty much agree with Eddie, except that I'd add that the SSMS log shipping wizard is a good starting point - it will create basic scripts for you to...

If it's purely for backup purposes, you may want to look at log shipping instead - I suspect it would be a much simpler solution for you to implement. ...

Is the timing difference ongoing? Detaching any database clears the plan cache on the server - there would be some overhead in compiling the queries. This might produce...

What exactly do you need to do? Replication may not be the best solution if you want to keep an entire database synchronised across locations, or if you just...

Assuming you are using SQL2005, you can rebuild indexes online if you have Enterprise edition. The level of fragmentation should dictate whether you need to rebuild or reorganize. ...

You can use mirroring in Standard edition but you are limited to synchronous ie the transactions are confirmed on the mirror before the primary - good for availability but it...

One the basis that you said it can take several minutes to return at times, the volume of data might make it beneficial to use temp tables instead of table...

No real impact from the default constraint itself - it will be a lengthy operation because the column is not null, meaning that every row must be updated with the...

Truncate requires at least ALTER TABLE permissions on that table. You can either grant the appropriate rights, use the EXECUTE AS clause in the procedure, or use a signed...

The costs are based on the plan using available stats ... if the stats don't represent the data then they will be off - check the execution plan for estimated...

You can change the mirror timeout duration to possibly avoid this scenario.

Include the checksum column and the character column in the where clause. The checksum index would be used to pull out all the potential matches, and these would then...

You can use it in this way, but you still need to do an additional check to confirm the results meet your criteria - two distinct values can give the...

Yes, you are correct - full backups reset the flags unless you use the COPY_ONLY option.