I cannot see how even 1000 sibling directories should create a bottleneck. To me, another typical design mistake seems to have been made by the author namely that all data...

Vodafone has a line of no-frills mobiles called Simply which you could like  (I am not connected with that company 🙂 )

Do you mean Express Edition? The Management Studio is not shipped with Express Edition but you can download a scaled down version from Microsoft

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=82afbd59-57a4-455e-a2d6-1d4c98d4 0f6e&DisplayLang=en

I also recommend two RAID 1's. Another benefit besides performance is better data security if you store the log and data files on different RAIDs.

I suggest 3 tables

ResourceHireParent

ResourceHirePupil

ResourceHireTutor

David Russel's complain prompted me to ask our MS Consultant who gave me a link to the centralized "Events And Errors Message Center".

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/support/ee/ee_advanced.aspx

Good luck!

Lookup "Resolving System Error Messages"

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/trblsql/tr_reslsyserr_1_6gxh.asp

There is no link on that page that brings you to the error codes but if you expand this topic on the table of contents...

One DBA of ours told me recently that even if you back up and shrink the transaction log, the file on disk never gets smaller. The server only resets the...

I encountered another issue namely if you don't do a full installation of SQL Server 2005, the creation of maintenance plans fails with an "unexpected error".

Microsoft told us recently that you...