Thanks Gail for the reply.

The system does not allow to proceed in SSMS. A prompted error refers to log_reuse_wait_desc column of sys.databases. The value of this field relevant...

Thanks Perry.

Can MSDTC share a drive owned by the SQL Server or the Quorum drive? Does it require a dedicated drive?

This is a great article pointing some important areas leading to team work spirit within a DBA team and providing superior professional services to an organization for a DBA team.

A...

Eric,

Options are available to deal with the situation you described.

If you just want to reduce the backup space need, 3rd party tool such as LiteSpeed, Richard mentioned, is great;...

You can implement these with SQL codes in SQL Server 2005 and the newer versions. T-SQL codes are better than the traditional server/database roles, because user needs can be granted...

For an ideal situation, columns making a clustered index should be not nullable and data of a column should be as unique as possible. The columns for the proposed clustered...

The recommended method to apply an OS patch is to begin with the passive (or secondary)node. After patching, cluster services' failover to the updated node is required. This is the...

Your database seems to be big. Both database mirroring and log shipping should work. If you are more familiar with log shipping, it will be better to use this method....

The unused space can be freed up and returned to the O.S. by shrinking each of the database files as below. Using SHRINKFILE is better than using SHRINKDATABASE.

USE <target_db>;

GO

-- Run...

According to some experts, if both the logical Avg Disk Reads/sec and logical Avg Disk Writes/sec are less than 8, the system unlikely experiences I/O contention.

Please try below for each instance:

SELECT name AS 'Login_Name'

,default_database_name AS 'Default_Database'

,is_disabled AS 'Status'

FROM sys.server_principals

WHERE type_desc = 'Windows_Login'

The purposes of a monitoring tool is different from that of a diagnostic one. You will want to get an overall picture, such as availability and general performance status, for...

Microsoft SCOM (System Center Operations Manager) seems to be a good one, especially for a shop with large amount of SQL Server instances.

Updating all statistics within a database seems to be easy but it may be costly, especially when the database is large. The primary reason is that updating statistics consumes significant...

The questions are very common and everything depends on your situation. There is a range of best practices white papers available for this topic.

"how do you come to the decisions...