Below are some best practise documents which u can refer.Hope it helps

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc750077.aspx

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc966456.aspx

But as per ur requirement since upgrade will take place in my view(i am not...

yes if ur upgrading from SQL Server2005 to SQL server 2008 or SQL server 2008R2

Below is some links which can be of help:

http://www.scalabilityexperts.com/tools/downloads.html

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms144256.aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc879337.aspx

Take backup of database and restore the same in diff machine. i guess u r referring to oracle server, you can get the same in oracle websites

u can use between while joining as said in above post but then it will not be optimized solution as ur query performance will hamper.

you can use row number with partitions to do the same

is the query conditions listed correctly . It may happen some conditions are not applied correctly because of spaces or something in the source table column values

For server level upgrade u can find SQL utilities which do the same quite easily . It will save ur time a lot

while accessing tables from two different databases u can use in ur queries databasename.tablename to qualify. As the servers are linked u can also use tables from other servers by...

Search on msdn site u will get lots of post on this topic.

I fully agree with lowell. Its better to avoid collation problems since then you have to take into account of collation in your queries.

Try restarting the sql server service and close SSMS and log in again and try it once. It should work

It is better to apply patches one by one. In this way you can minimize server downtime. Otherwise all your 3 servers will be down for the process.It is not...

Query degradation can be a factor of :

Not having proper indexes defined

Not writing optimized queries

Server level tuning not done

Below are some more threads u can check

https://www.simple-talk.com/sql/performance/a-performance-troubleshooting-methodology-for-sql-server/

http://www.sql-server-performance.com/forum/threads/what-to-do-if-your-sql-server-system-is-slow.2213/

SQL: a language for talking to the database. It lets you select data, mutable and create database objects (like tables, views, etc.), change database settings.

T-SQL: (procedural) extensions for SQL used...

You can link the two servers as linked servers. Then tables can be accessed as per your requirement. It is better to export the table as a file from one...