Craig,

You should have no worries with a polling interval of 30 seconds, commercial products dwarf that load.

The next step is determining which counters fluctuate enough to be relevant (for constant...

Bsql_Dev,

The needs described are what we call Disaster Recovery or DR. The first task in architecting DR is establishing Recovery Point Objectives RPO and Recovery Time Objectives RTO. RPO is...

The benefits of configuring tempdb to use multiple files are both io throughput and parellelism. Cores can "attach" to their own file, enhancing parallel execution. Adding disks always helps, that's...

Verify tempdb is on 4 - 8 equally sized files.

Experiment with maxdop initially at 4. Parallelism is typically your friend, not always.

The goal should be designing queries to have...

SQLIO is great tool for testing server perfomance prior to installing SQL, it produces latency and throughput numbers that can be compared before and after your server level tweaks. You...

The options are database mirroring or SAN mirroring.

Ability to be synchronous is dictated by latency. The primary factor is typically distance between facilities.

Dan

I would consider grouping content databases on seperate mount points instead of splitting databases on secondary files. This will spread out your IO and provide flexibility in addressing IO concerns...

From a standardizaton standpoint yes the Primary / Composite Key columns should be the first column(s). Don't underestimate the benefits of designing legibility into your solutions.

From a performance angle yes...

Capacity Planning - Measure and compare peak and business hours requirements for Memory, CPU, Disk IO and Network Bandwidth. Peak for some systems may be during off hours while backups...

I wouldn't consider local maintenance plans to be a scalable solution.

As your environment grows you may see a need for a centralized management solution.

Dan

How is the user experience now? You might want to run a trace just to verify that what SpotLight reports is really a valid concern.

Reads, Duration and CPU for the...

I would recommend concentrating on the first eight tables listed in the stored procedure proc_UpdateStatistics.

The proper maxdop setting depends on a number of variables. Experiment!

Dan

SharePoint suffers from known database design issues that can impact performance over time. The use of composite keys and GUID's for clustered indexes requires diligent maintanance. Specific tables will degrade...

Run ALTER DATABASE <dbname> SET PARTNER SAFETY FULL to synchronize the databases before failing over.

Verify synchronization with:

SELECT

sd.Name,

dm.*

FROM...

Run SQLIO to benchmark disk performance.

Adjust Queue Depth setting on HBA to at least 64.

Stripe disks on SAN frame, do not use host based striping. Do not concatenate large quantities...