1) Raid 5 is HORRIBLE for the boot (C) drive.  I assume your OS page file is there, as well as tempdb.  RAID 5 is suboptimal for both of those.

2)...

I would recommend either reading a book covering these topics or hiring a professional to come in and give you a review and written suggestions using your systems and requirements. ...

Lock pages in memory only works for the Enterprise version of SQL Server 2005.

64bit processors will be faster for given clock rates because they move larger amounts of data/instructions through...

I have a GREAT implementation for you.  Use Binary Encoding.  With this mechanism, a single tiny/small/int field can represent multiple states at once.  Take a smallint.  Limit is +-32765.  Powers...

I have never yet been at a client that didn't have at least a half-dozen people with SA priviledges, so that (locking out db create permission) wouldn't work in any...

I agree with Noel and Scott.  I too have gotten all of my consulting clients via word-of-mouth referrals and also haven't had to update my resume in about 10 years. ...

I'm all for cross-over training!  One it can open your eyes to different methods you can use in your own domain and two it saves the company from the classic...

Loner, IMHO using an Oracle expert to bring up Hyperion on SQL Server (or do ANY consulting on SQL Server platforms) is a bad idea.  I am extremely good at...

I do some teaching as well as consulting so I come across a lot of people who work with SQL Server in some fashion or another, so I have a...

Do you really execute the DELETE with no WHERE clause?  That simply can't be good/right.    And if it is, then you certainly don't...

Be careful with dbcc dbreindex.  If you turn it loose against all tables/indexes you could wind up with a transaction log the size of Texas!  Check BOL and various other...

1) Be VERY careful comparing time runs between query executions.  You must flush both the RAM cache and Procedure cache between each execution (or do a few runs first if...

1) Run it on a different box.

2) Add another disk.

3) Create more free space on existing drive (delete files, esp IE crap and temp files, reconfigure recycle bin (this is...

1) To address your original issue of the sort taking so long to respond, indexing won't help unless it is clustered, and that would then only help when sorting THAT...

Continuing with Journeyman's post, try forcing the optimizer to use only non-parallel query plan on the INSERT by using the optimizer hint MAXDOP (I think it is called - check...