Nice article - I voted 5 🙂

A few things I'dd add:

(1) check the server collation. Where I currently am DBA I have to standardise the collations across 20 servers because previous DBAs didn't see a difference between SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS and

Latin1_General_CI_AS :(. This is best dealt with sooner rather than later to avoid the pain of changing all the column collations, checking code, constraints etc.

(2) Check that the correct version of SQL Server is being used. On some of my systems consultants have installed SQL 2005 Enterprise Edition when Standard will do fine - unlike SQL 2000 the general functionality is much closer to Enterprise and there is a difference of £10k or so per processor.

(2) Check the physical memory and if AWE is enabled if necessary (and change Boot.ini etc).

(3) Check the audit of licenses and if multiple procs are being taken account of in a multi-core machine.

(4) Check that the master key is being backed up if it is used.

(5) BUILTIN\Administrators - policy for enabling/disabling exists?

(6) Who is in the sysadmin role and are they supposed to be there (I have inherited several application users in the sysadmin role!).

Probably other checks I've forgotten but this is all I can think of right now. Personally I poll the servers for most of this type of info and collect it centrally, and fortunately our life for this sort of administration will become easier with the Policy based Management in SQL 2008. Anyway, thanks again for the useful article.

Paul Ibison