Outstanding article!  Very thorough with great references for further information. 

I agree with Brian's post -- that's the most infuriating thing to have applications that demand dbo, or worse, sysadmin...

I love this article Steve.  These are the kinds of things I like to think about and discuss.

At one point I was preaching a DBA ten commandments.  One that I...

Great feedback, everyone!   It's true, there are lots of things to consider (setting expectations is a good example), and then again considering everything isn't always the best approach.  I've seen...

This is a great question! I think what you're looking for is some sort of event that is fired when the autogrow kicks in -- is that correct? ...

Another thing to consider is what types of servers you're consolidating. As gfarlander pointed out, one of the drawbacks is that you have multiple instances on one server. ...

As SQLBill pointed out, the cluster is probably not even initiating a failover. If you have two NICs in each node, one for just cluster heartbeat traffic and one...

Excellent article! It really brings out a very real issue that is overlooked by most -- backups don't protect you from everything. As you say at the end...

With vendors, the goal of multi-instance is exactly that -- segregating security environments. I've hit more than one 3rd party app where the Vendor where the vendor wants SA...

"Feel free to submit these to sqlwish@microsoft.com. It goes to the dev team."

Been done, repeatedly 🙂 The real question is, if a hardier SQL Authentication engine were available,...

I've actually used it a lot, primarily in situations where there was a desire to consolidate hardware and segregate security environments. It's a solution you really need to keep an...

Well said Andy, and I totally agree. One thing I always ask when I'm at a client when the topic comes up -- how well is your NT/2000 environment...