We are an HP shop and I have the good fortune to know and trust (but verify!)an HP Systems Engineer that supports the Sales staff. So my method is...

Scenario is something like my IT peers want to implement AD in a couple of months. They asked me to certify our SQL environment for the coming migration. ...

Generally we don't allow dev to prod linked servers even in the read-only case. However, we do have one significant exception and I am not proud of it. ...

Cool. I have a remote site that is about to rehost to W2K & S2K. Your solution will come in handy!

In my environment we have only had a couple of projects employ OLAP. We have hundreds of projects that do not. I haven't had the pleasure of working...

Context is important. The benefits of standardization and defined processes for your production boxes will help you sleep at night!

Now my general context is large shared SQL servers (many...

I understand your point. Now just because something is possible, doesn't mean it should be done. I was pointing out that from a production dba point of view...

An alternative to the author's suggestion would be to have the production job owned by a member of the sysadmin group such as a production DBA. The advantages are...

Directly manage 25 servers from 6.5 to 2000 in dev, test, and production. I consult and sometimes manage another 45 dedicated servers as the need arises. We (team...

We strongly advise dbo ownership of all objects for our environment. From time to time there is a "special circumstance" where non-dbo ownership is a good thing. Those...

In the general case one isolates development. If anything I wish we had more smaller dev servers and less big shared dev boxes so I could partion sandbox and thus...

Our production DBA's manage the movement of most projects from Development (DEV), Test (TST), and Production (PRD). Smaller, simpler projects test in DEV. Critical and larger projects have...

The item I will agree with you on is that Production DBA's can not exist in a vacuum. Prior to my taking over the production DBA group, the existing...