Now I'd love to see that!  Especially since the highest TPC benchmark ever achieved by SQL Server is 1.2 Million per minute and that was using a 64 CPU Itanium...

I have built systems in SQL Server that processed more than 2.5 million transactions per hour with DRI.  That was on 32 bit hardware and SQL 2000, and the system...

You've basically got it.  I had to remove every last trace of the CTP before I could get the install to work properly.

My thoughts exactly.  It isn't a fair comparison. 

I have a major problem with even the premise of the question though.  If you are just concerned with throughput, then don't...

Yes, and No...  Microsoft Clustering provides ZERO load balancing capabilities for SQL Server, however, you could create an "active/active" cluster with some sort of partitioning or replication between them and...

The things that you are used to doing in earlier versions are generally not a big problem in 2005, since MS did a pretty good job of keeping it backward compatible. ...

No, MS finally gave us a usable set of system views in 2005 and removed the ability to directly query or change the system tables.  As I understand it, even...

You need to do some serious reading...  There are tons of posts here and Books Online has complete information on that subject.

However, the short answer is that if you don't...

You can restore a database from a full backup (what you are creating) but if you aren't backing up the transaction log you will not be able to restore to...

See the article entitled "How to: Save an Execution Plan in XML Format" in BOL

About the only way to control row level rights is through views.  If you create a view that returns only rows that meet certain criteria, then grant a user permission...

You can't manually update statistics on the system tables.  Frankly I can't think of a reason you'd need to.

Based on our testing, we are moving all new project development to 2005.  Our current products will migrate individially as new releases come out. 

We are well into development of...

Databases can be transfered back and forth between 64bit and 32bit servers the same way that they are between two 32bit servers... 

While virtualization is fine for development and testing environments (as long as you aren't trying to run benchmarks) I would never run a producton SQL Server on a virtual machine. ...