I wouldn't put that VPN project off, as you'll have quite a lot more to do if someone hacks into your 'sa' account from outside.

I have the study guides, and plan on getting certified just because.  My employer will reimburese me for the cost of the tests, so I don't see any downside to...

I'd never assume that SQL will convert the way you'd expect.  I believe that a conversion to integer would be seen by the execution engine as 'simpler' than converting to...

In SQL2K:

select isnull(convert(varchar(10),@X,101),'Unassigned')

I agree with Karl.  Use your own procedures to implement log shipping.  That way, you don't have to use the Enterprise version, nor are you stuck with SQL's implementation of...

I sold the pair of guides already.  I still have 1 first edition study book for the 70-229 test (T-SQL).  I'll sell it for $35 shipping included.  Still interested?

After a teleconference with the vendor, it became obvious they were used to dealing with clients that had moderately large installations (about 20 users per database) as opposed to our...

I'm an MCDBA, and I think they did help me to pass.  That, and working with SQL every day.  The sample questions were really useful.  I'll sell the pair for...

The "no chance that the application doesn't perform well due to hardware" sounds like the most reasonable answer.

I'm going to recommend to my CIO that we buy servers when performance...

Your approach will work fine when you are the only person testing it, when you get the bugs out.  But the nature of ASP apps is that you may have...

It's considered a best practice to write your select statements with explicit field names instead of star (*).  There are some "hints" available that may help, such as:

NOLOCK:  Do not...

Copying your post locally, or even composing it with an editor, is the best solution.  There is very little that the site can do if there is a problem with...

Somewhere here there's a script for dealing with the User logins and the orphaned users on the new server.  Maybe someone else will point it out to you.

I'd go with Win 2K3 Server.  And make sure you get SQL Enterprise, so it will take advantage of all that extra RAM.

The simplest thing to do would be to apply SP4, and see if you get the error with that version.  Though I haven't ever had an error with SP3a, there...