I totally agree, Mark's monitor is great for efficiently tracking individual DB's inside SQL. I get a little nervous modifying MSDB or running XP procedures so there is a little...

Thanks for the script Rcarlson! It doesn't quite do the same thing but it is more useful in general (non sql server administration). I think I'll parameterize the inputs so...

Sadly I gave up and 'rolled my own' notifcation service for this particular app. If you find a solution please share! I've been thinking of giving another try pretty soon.

Agreed...it would have been interesting to see his schema/logic modifications and cleanup sequence. As is, the article isn't very useful.

I'm not sure how you plan on getting the file names converted to inputs to Bob's procedure, but you could combine his method in a DTS job combining some VBS...

Multiple CPU benefits depend on your application. Keep in mind that for licensing MS requires 1 license per processor (physical processor, not logical as case with hyperthreading). In some cases...

To all:

Thank you for your time and ideas. After Microsoft analyzed the issue and reproduced it on their end, this behavior was deemed a bug. The temporary work around is...

To all:

Thank you for your time and ideas. After Microsoft analyzed the issue and reproduced it on their end, this behavior was deemed a bug. The temporary work around is...

To all:

Thank you for your time and ideas. After Microsoft analyzed the issue and reproduced it on their end, this behavior was deemed a bug. The temporary work around is...

What tools are your clients running, or what are the specifics on how they connect to and use your db?

You might be going offline from your exchange server and Outlook just builds the emails up in the outbox. You might be able to set Outlook to stop going offline.

Also...

Would executing a transaction log from several days of prod activity against the test database work to simulate this load? Just a thought. I'm still confused on how to simulate...

Well, with the inner join syntax the proper efficient execution plan is always chosen so this syntax wouldn't help me. Is there a way to use the hash hint with...

My server load include updates, inserts, selects, deletes. Would I just be simulating selects? It seems that the other operations would cause data constraint violations. If I'm just doing selects...

Thanks for the interest. I backed up prod and restored it to a test server. The slow behavior was not there. So I took the same backup file and restored...