Having consolidated many servers, I can safely say..no, there is no way to predict exactly what kind of resources you will need.

You can get a ballpark though by looking at...

The SQL 2008 installer is a disaster and a half, honestly. There are so many bugs in it that I have no idea how it ever got through their QA...

I always pause mirroring before I shut down a server. I've never had an issue with mirroring being unable to restart if I just stop the SQL service, but to...

Open up SQL Server Configuration Manager, check Network Configuration, and make sure Named Pipes is enabled for that instance.

Maxdop 0 is generally a bad setting regardless. If you have 24 logical CPUs, I would force maxdop 8 on the server.

What is the total ram on the box, btw?...

Are you sure this isn't a result of the data already being in the buffer cache?

If you ran the query without the index and it took 50 seconds, then added...

You still didn't post the expected results.

Just free-type the results you are hoping to get, and we can write a query to get them for you.

Just save the step output to a text file, like you should already be doing, and then create two steps for notification in the job, so it looks like this:

1)...

Use one of the creation templates, fill in your info, and then use that on your other few computers? There's not a whole lot of info that needs to be...

Page Life Expectancy is a good measure to see if instances need more or less memory, btw. I have a bunch of multi-instance boxes and the difference between <5min PLE...

I'm a bit confused by the post.

Can you please post the expected results, and what you get with your current query?

edit: whoops, had this open for a while before I...

Also force maxdop to 0 if your server isn't already set to it....a horrible, awful query like that should eat up every available core.

Thanks Gail & SQLBuddy. I'm still working on learning the internals of indexing.

sqlbuddy123 (9/7/2010)

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Hi Derrick,

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laddu4700 (9/7/2010)

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Thanks for your replies.

I have successfully removed BUILTIN/Administrator after adding the group to SQL Login that used to administer the SQL Server.

Our server is SQL Server 2005 cluster server...

Maybe Gail or someone else more knowledgeable can correct me, but creating a nonclustered index that contains every column is more or less identical (for selecting) to a clustered index.

It...