Thanks a lot John for the info.  This is more explanation than what we rec'd from MS.

Hi Karl,

We're using SQL Server log-shipping "out of the box," with maintenance plans and the log-shipping monitor.

The transaction logs reside on the local drive at the time they are restored. ...

We do not explicitly kill the restore process.  I am wondering if: when SQL Server shuts down, if it kills a restore process.  I would be surprised if it was...

Thanks for your help Steve.

Regarding converting the mdb file to a SQL Server DB, It's puzzling to me why MS didn't do that for us to begin with! 

Thanks Hari.

Can you elaborate though?  Should it be converted to a SQL Server DB just for the sake of getting the table information I'm talking about?  Or should it be...

....Oh, I forgot to mention, we use the default Character Set at that comes with standard install.

We ran into this  on a 4-way machine running win2k and sql2k.  MS recommended that we have use the '-g 384' switch for SQL Server startup.  That reserves more space...

Thanks Allen.  I'm showing this to the application development team.

Yes.  We're getting blockers.  It seems to happen only when the locks are not released.  When things are working the way the app developers intended, then no one realizes that...

master probably cannot be restored by someone other than sa - no?

Yes.  I figured out that you can do it that way too.

Good input BillH except:

When she moves the databases to a test server, defragmentation will be a result of copying the databases.  So she won't realize any benefit from defragging the test...

We have several production SQL Servers in our environment.  We used SAN for years because it was "The Enterprise Disk Solution."  We had many outages related to the complexity of...

We monitor for disk queue length on the database and log file drive.  On those servers where disk queue length seemed to be getting bad, we ran disk defrag during...

Steve,

Great article. 

Can you elaborate on the rule of thumb for disk queue length and Processor Queue Length.  In the past, I have heard that anything (sustained) above 2 is a...