I found the article interesting and entertaining. The amount of vitriol it's generated is pretty surprising considering how mild the article was overall.

One comment about interviews from the interviewer side....

Even though you're running through Query Analyzer, I'll bet you're connecting through ODBC instead of through a native connection. Take a look in Control Panel at the ODBC settings. Either...

Everything everyone else said, plus, you can split off storage of text columns into a seperate file to keep maintenance of the text information seperate from the rest of your...

Thanks for the info. What types of maintenance headaches did you run into specifically? Disk space is kind of hard to argue, it being so cheap these days, but other...

I ran a search on the MS site and it looks like you may be behind on a service pack or two.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/825197

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;330307

It kind of depends on what you need. I'm pretty lucky at my company and we've got both Embarcadero DBArtisan and Quest Central. For object management, generating scripts, that sort...

Pretty straight-forward. ODBC has a query timeout setting. You've got options. Set the timeout higher. Tune the queries you're running so that they're faster. Verify the indexing strategy is good...

Good news. You've got an index allocation error. Easiest kind to fix. Drop the index and recreate it. Make sure you've got the recreate script handy prior to dropping of...

One thing not mentioned, is there a difference in parameters being passed by the various users? Are the first three calling proc A and passing in a parameter that returns...

While there are exceptions, the general rule would be to use a join against either a table or a derived table. It's almost always going to be faster becuase of...

I also can't tell you what caused it, but I ran into the same issue. I ran change owner proc against it to set the owner to a user that...

You're going to have to, minimum, set the traceflag 1204 to on. That will spit a bunch of information into your sql error log file that you can use to...

In addition to what everyone has suggested (and the experience thing is the biggest and most important), I'd add the book: Database Administration by Craig S. Mullins. It's not specific...

Fantastic advice... Except for the GUID's. Indexing, especially clustered indexes, against GUID's is pretty problematic. They're bloody slow. I'd be very cautious in when, where, and how I introduced them...

Everything Peter said...

The caveat that you have to be aware of is memory. Every document handle takes a certain amount of memory. Then the document itself chews up memory. Memory...