One of the problems with Autoshrink is that it will run when you don't want it.

Turn AutoShrink off and set up a nightly job to do database maintenance.

Patrick

Larry, you are right. I was being sarcastic. I did run my own business last year and it did fail, and the breaks were no where near enough to salvage...

Yes, my US tax rate is around 20%. I am married, and that adds all kinds of hands reaching for my paycheck.

I live in Texas which is one of...

Yes. Those are the companies that believe that you (as the lone DBA) will have plenty of free time.

In Texas the salary range is anywhere between $40K - $110K....

We get tax breaks when the business fails, so why not?

Seriously, it's sometimes easier to be on your own rather than having a staffing company take 60% of the wage.

Patrick

It depends on how the Payroll system accesses the database.

Is it a series of stored procedures? Updates? You should have an idea of what the payroll system does.

I also agree...

Laughing. It is Pandora's box. But we know what happens on a database.

I had a client who had written requirement that the administrator would not have access to private data....

Be sure that every statement is documented. Keep copies of everything. Print out their emails and keep a file. If they are ignoring your best practices, that's fine. But you...

The users should not have an expectation of privacy if they use a company database. As mentioned before, I assume that my transactions are logged when I use an ATM...

Reindexing is good - but it depends on how many inserts, updates, deletes you have every day. You may be able to get by with a job that runs sp_updatestats.

A...

The ability to quote Monty Python, Douglas Adams, etc at a moment's notice.

The ability to drink and still look as if you are solving a very difficult puzzle.

The...

Right about the comma part, and certainly if I misspelled varchar.

Thanks,

Patrick

True, data is kept in a heap unless there is a clustered index.

Indexing the tables will, probably, help with response time. Could you create a trace and run Profiler,...

Ok, just a guess, but here goes.

If the query fails because of syntax error QA will let you know about what line.

For example,

DECLARE @hat varchar(10)

@coat varchar(20)

will return an error...

True. I would also say that you spend a fair amount of time writing everything. I prepared a project management document that presented the scope and how we would handle...