This article describes exactly what the code is trying to do (get an IX lock via an empty update), and may have been where the idea came from. This...

With most SQL components the passive node can't even run, thereby enforcing the clustering license model.

As I'm interpreting the installation, there is now a possible 2nd SSIS installation that COULD...

What does this do to SQL licensing?

Assuming active/passive, the cluster typically only needs licensing for the active servers, but now you've got 2 possible machines that can actively...

I liked the question, I've had to debug a piece of code that was doing this technique. While not failing from a illegal datatype conversion, it was doing the...

If you don't already have it and can get the budget for it, consider a backup solution can do table-level restores. With a large database, it's valuable to not...

I'd think your SQL caches will need more RAM to work with. At 20GB, you're probably getting and keeping most of your most active data pages in the SQL...

I've also seen this at a place where there wasn't redundancy on the AD/DNS server. It was accidentally added to an auto-update policy group for Windows patches. That...

"If the connection stays open, the tables will stay in tempdb"

Does connection pooling count here as the connection staying open?

The connections do a sp_reset_connection, but does this imply that #temp...

If you're logging activity from web sites, there's options besides logging directly. Unless there's a need for true real-time logging, look around at the other parts of your computing...

We use Subsonic (ORM similar to hibernate, for .net) with C#, and I submit that it's not an either proc or ORM proposition. I do think that either side...

The requirement on this is when there's only 1 chain, select it as the default and let the report auto-run. Otherwise (multiple chains exist), select nothing as the default...

Just a note that Win2003 mainstream support ends next month (7/13/2010). You can still get extended support through 7/13/2015, but this can be expensive and not be a guarantee...

One thing on a mentor, it's great to find an SQL Server pro as a mentor, but I'd say that it doesn't have to be strictly SQL Server - take...

To pull an idea from my ...um, thin air...

When I'm looking at the executed plan each component knows how many rows it handled, and the components used in the initial...

I get this error periodically (2 clusters + EMC CX3 SAN over 4GB FC), and it's absolutely IO with the SAN.

I can trace it down to when I have a...