Thanks...

To all who gave suggestions and arguments for and against, many thanks. I apologize for not responding quicker, I do really appreciate the time everyone gave me to provide some...

Lowell (3/2/2016)

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if it's truly a handful of tables, and the servers can talk to each other, i'd consider using either a MERGE statement or a pair of UPDATE/INSERT;

that assumes...

SQLBill (3/2/2016)

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Are you only refreshing data? Or do you need to update the schema also? If you only need the data, you could use BCP to bring the...

Jeff Moden (3/2/2016)

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For each table to be loaded...

I still think it's more fun just to do a wholesale restore from prod because people will make bloody sure that their stuff...

That does seem to be about the only way that I've seen. Short of buying another tool or spending a lot of time trying to build something.

But it has been...

Thanks, your idea 2 is probably what I'll have to do unless I can get the developers to make sure they have their in-process stored procedures scripted and able to...

I've thought about that as well but there are dozens, maybe several dozen, SP's in some of the databases. And most of the SP's will not have changed. Capturing this...

Thanks for all the responses. I agree there won't be a noticeable improvement in performance either way. But from a management standpoint, having everything on one disk would be difficult,...

I'm not seeing any problems, at least none of the users are realistically complaining. The monitors say the disk IO is good and latency is under 15ms or so. Occasionally...

Good suggestion but I forgot to mention that was one of the first things I checked. Both are running under the same AD account.

Like I said, I'm really stumped and...

Thanks for the suggestion Jeff. I did find the db owner was changed to me after I refreshed the contents from a backup. (Have to remember to do this after...

Sorry for taking up your time. I did find the problem; apparently SQL 2014 Express installs this with the SQL Browser disabled. Once I noticed this and changed it to...

Thank you Perry for the solution - works great. It has been one of those weeks that makes a DBA know they are not paid enough...

I am now happily playing...

Thank you, I did figure that missing step out a bit ago. It seems to work as near as I can tell from some limited testing.

I appreciate the advice and...