Having used SQL Compare for a couple of years now out in-the-field, I'd agree with your observations Robert. It is an excellent product, very stable and does what it is...

Accentuate the positive - thank you, that's the phrase I was looking for - so true.  Loading up the customer's own data is a definite bonus, although in some situations...

Good article Steve, this is an area that is too often overlooked. Just a few thoughts on the data side : My personal preference for demo data is to use...

A fix for this problem has been found.  Although slightly different to the one we experienced, the problem is described at :

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;814113

...and the hotfix for it can be downloaded...

Just spotted something else with regard to an earlier post about clustered indexes:

"Keep the number of indexes down to what is actually required as the more indexes used, the more...

Christy,

Some good advice there with regard to specifics, so thought I'd add some more general troubleshooting advice.

A very simple way to ascertain if you need to concentrate on the application...

Apologies if I mis-understood the statement, but if you're ordering 32G of RAM and you're not sure if you can use it, shouldn't you check first ??!!

Excellent article Andres, learnt a few things just in that short piece about lock escalation which I wasn't aware of which will certainly help when performance tuning. If there are...

Without getting into the philosophical question of which OS is "better", I think the number of sites dedicated to criticising Windows compared to those knocking Linux is indicative of the...

Chris,

I know there's a couple of products on the market that already do this sort of thing (can't remember the names off the top of my head, I know one...

Totally agree - bad enough that data types can't be standardised across databases/programming languages, let alone adding nonsense like spaces and underscores to object names. Added to which, doesn't it...

Andy, just to confirm you're right. I ran ISQLW.exe through Dependency Walker (see Herve Roggero's article at

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/columnists/hroggero/doevents.asp) - great tool.

SQLDMO.dll does not appear to be loaded by QA...

Interesting. We've got over 1,400 tables in each of our databases (20+) in a Sage Enterprise system, and we don't see 45 second delays at login, ever, even when it's...

Andy,

According to the article at http://www.sql-server-performance.com/statistics.asp :

"If the number of rows in a table are greater than 6, but less than or equal to 500, then statistics are...

Good question.

The advice I've always understood to be correct and which I've found has been born out in practice is that if there's been significant changes in the values of...