In most organisations, MCDBA is unlikely to improve your salary or career path on its own.  You need to show by your actions you are worth paying more.

In job hunting,...

Why are you not using NT only security.  We do this on all our servers bar 1.  The odd one is running some legacy web-based applications that require SQL authentication.

NT...

I completely agree with Brian.

There are a number of issues here...

1) Comparisom with other vendor's release stategy.

My main experience is with DB2.  When IBM are near to making a new...

I would set the database offline.  Even a single user connected would stop the DETACH working.

Use the same process as you would on a normal SQL Server database.

Connect to the MSDE instance in Enterprise Manager, right-click and select Properties, then set the required memory on...

The System Monitor disk counters can give misleading results with SQL Server.

SQL continually monitors how long it takes for a disk read request to complete.  If I-O time is slow, SQL will...

There is very little on newsgroups or in Microsoft documentation about how W2000 or W2003 manages disk I-O.  Certainly this is true when compared to mainframe z/OS, where ther are...

It is not possible to give generic advice about placing TempDB data and logs on the same controller.  You will have to test this using your own hardware.

However, you can...

You should work with your SAN vendor in deciding which type of RAID to use.  We are installing some HDS 9970v SANs, and have confidence in Hitachi's recommendation of formatting...

xp_Stopmail is fine to do on the command line, but beware of including it in an application.

One of our developers thought it would be 'safer' to wrap a xp_sendmail within...

You definitely need to troubleshoot MAPI problems by being logged on using the SQL Server service account.  Anything else is normally a waste of time.

As to the question 'Why now?',...

The evaluation was done before I joined the organisation.  We have done mini-evaluations since then, and confirmed that no other Windows-based replication tool offers superior facilities to D-T.  Some match...

We are currently using Double-Take in production to replicate both databases and application files for Active/Passive failover.   Our average latency between our current main and DR sites about 10 km...

As suggested, you can use TargetServersRole, but with modified permissions.  This will allow users access to all jobs.  If you give them the ability to add/change/delete jobs, this will apply...

If your database files took up 30GB of disk space when you made the backup, then you will need 30GB of spare disk space when you do the restore.  This...