I'm not looking for something that is heavily focused on querying but rather for something to help with basic administration stuff like creating, modifying, copying, moving, backing up, restoring and troubleshooting databases as well as info on security.

For example, a potential project involves synchronizing customer records in a DBF table with the customer records in a SQL table used by a commercial software product. During testing, I need to be able put the SQL database back to it's original state again after each test.

While this is probably elementary to many here, I've never been exposed to it and need to get some clue where to start. If anyone could recommend any good resources (I prefer books), I'd be grateful.

Thanks, Carl

Those don't sound like elementary things to me at all. This is more advanced stuff actually. If you find something that covers these tasks in a good consolidated book or resource please let us know - I could use that myself. I have home brew solutions for most of these things but their pretty rough and always difficult to find and reuse.

As to testing you can potentially use a distributed transaction manager to run your tests in a distributed transaction, then roll the whole thing back. It'll work with regular transactions as well, but more difficult to see it work if you have other rollback scenarios.

+++ Rick ---

Nonetheless, I need to learn it. It's primarily the Express edition that I need to work with and I found a book whose TOC makes it look promising. I'll buy it and let you know if I found it helpful.

Carl

I have a set of older books called Inside SQL Server 2005 by Itzik Ben-Gan. (T-SQL Querying, T-SQL Programming, The Storage Engine - Kalen Delaney).
Any book that he has written is going to be well worth it.

He tends to write about the things you need to know!

Bob