Yak! If you're ever in a restaurant that serves it, go for it - incredible, better than the best chunk of beef I've ever had and even less fat...

Get your SAN vendor involved. For homework beforehand be ready to describe the current physical and logical disk setup including SCSI controllers of your existing server and current I/O...

As an addition to Jacobs comments Kerberos is also very sensitive to DNS issues - make sure that you have both regular and reverse DNS entries for both servers. ...

I'll echo Matt here - rule #1 of effective/useful BI initiatives is determining what questions you want to answer before you even start collecting data... never go for the...

As for Oracle you'll need the 64-bit versions of the Oracle drivers installed to use linked servers - depending on your needs you may well need to install both the...

Jack -

The 32 vs. 64 bit IIS/ASP.Net issue is only the first you're going to run into, particularly running SSIS, etc. All of the SQL Server 2005 "core" features...

A couple of additional thoughts:

(1) Who pays for tools (e.g. home internet connection, cell phone, laptop/desktop)? Company rules regarding cell phone usage, home internet connections, etc. vary wildly...

One thing to take a look at would be the drivers/libraries that the application is using to access SQL Server. I remember seeing that the latest JDBC libraries had...

CC -

I stand corrected; apparently there will be 32 bit versions of SQL 2008 which is a change from what I had read at CTP5, I thought it was pretty...

I'm with Jeff on this one. There are advantages to using NULL in certain circumstances - appropriately used NULLs are a great tool, particularly for aggregates (e.g. Average, sum,...

Database mail is your answer on SQL 2005, take a look at "Database Mail" and sp_send_dbmail in BOL.

Database mail maintains it's own mail queues, etc. and SQL Server itself should...

Hardware sizing is as much art as science but you need to ask some serious questions about the expected performance of the server before picking a particular server - you...

The Denver SQL Server Users group has had some really good presentations over the last couple of months on the new features in SQL 2008 including one from Paul Nielsen...

The chart a few posts ago just begs the question of what it the typical ratio of DBA's to developers in your organization. In many organizations the ratio of...

This thread absolutely fascinates me, largely because of the diversity of opinions...

One question for the masses: VMWare vs. the competition? VMWare has had a pretty commanding lead in...