Similar to Lowell's description, I've had this setup at 2 employers with a twist.

1st level is basic, replies heavily on documentation & flowcharts. These can be people from IT...

At my current company, we got as far as the pricing for the 2005 to 2008 upgrade. As soon as we found out there's no actual upgrade license, and...

It'll be a clustered scan on Import, so that doesn't get any better.

The biggest goal is to reduce I/O, so I agree that the indexing is all-crucial for the Product...

You're right on what you point out. This was a quick-typed sample query to demonstrate my question, so things like IsNull, object owners, etc are actually good in the...

Use the numeric datatype.

1. Stated above, choose the type of numeric based on the possible range of values. Even if you guess wrong, it's fairly easy (or easy...

I agree with the "Inside SQL Server" series mentioned above. After being a SQL DBA for 13 years & getting certified, I discovered these books. I'm somewhat chagrined...

This "Logins/second" metric came in handy for me this week. I had seen this particular metric running in the 200-400 range (using connection pooling). When my developers did...

The load is done with SSIS, not using the Table Lock, using Rows per batch and Maximum insert commit size to help keep locking somewhat reasonable.

I've yet to have problems...

Production has several 100MM records, and I'm adding 100MM new each week. My add process is the only way records get added or changed for these tables.

These new records...

Virtualization (VMWare) with blade center has been a very good move for us. Scalability, flexability, cost-effective, redundancy - all the things we DBAs look for in a server. ...