No, it's a valid approach in terms of taking backups and then restoring one, but your selection of the backup to restore might have been wrong. It would have...

You should look in Books Online, which will explain it far more thoroughly than anyone will want to post here. It really depends on how you want to set...

You posted the same question here http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic889826-146-1.aspx. I answered there, but please keep to one thread per question.

I'm not positive because I have never tried to simulate it, but if none of the servers in a mirror-witness setup can see each other then there can be no...

I'd ask them why they want autocreate stats on if they are going to do it themselves.

Pragmatic works have some free webinars at the moment - http://www.pragmaticworks.com/resources/webinars/March2010Webinar.aspx - you may find them useful.

If anything, I would rather have the option to take a full, copy-only backup of the existing database as part of the restore (probably as part of the WITH clause).

I guess it depends on what you mean by OLTP. If it's pure OLTP then there probably aren't many (any?) queries that would generate parallel query plans (assuming it...

Well, it would be a problem if you had a large number of these - are you talking tens, hundreds or thousands?

The resource governor was only introduced in SQL2008. You can limit resources to a degree in 2005 with processor affinity and server memory settings, but these only apply at...

It's been a while since I looked at this but I think you are correct that it is a simple process. I'm not positive on the ODBC part but...

Do you have a central server that could oversee these tasks (maybe excluding the backups themselves) ? If so, and it's a recent version, then I would probably put...

I'm assuming by unknown you mean non-default?

You can use a dynamically-assigned (at startup) port but as Adi said, you might run into firewall issues depending on your setup. ...

As far as writing code against SQL, get yourself the developer version ($50ish, same as Enterprise edition without the license for production use) or Express if you don't want to...

It sounds nice, but you have to take into account the other benefits that mirroring gives you - automatic failover primarily. How would you handle the conversations between multiple...