All queries rely upon the two columns - sometimes both, sometimes just one of the two. The partitioning is needed and impacts performance. The clustering is needed and...

Chris,

I know you can do it but am not 100% positive as to how. I know it involves creating sub-collections of the objects but that's about it. I've...

It's pricy, but ER Studio handles our (legacy) monster DB fine.

I have some more testing to do but it looks like that will do the trick. Thanks.

Yeah, I know I am and I've tried to figure that out. Problem is, UserGroups doesn't *join* to anything and CROSS APPLY doesn't use JOIN.

Best bet is to just do some searches on this forum/website. There's lots of hands-on experience with full text right at your fingertips.

A few quick things to consider:

full text...

I'd try stopping and restarting Agent. Also look at the jobs themselves to see if anything has monkeyed with their settings.

Agent mail is (slightly) different that DB mail.

Check what's up on SQL Server Agent | Properties | Alert system

I used to maintaine a 3TB DB. We had mirroring implemented on it for recovery and reporting purposes. When I did the big ops like index rebuilds, I'd...

I'm of the SET for one, SELECT for multiple set.

For a book, take a look at Joe Celko's Thinking in Sets.

Note that changing server or database collation does NOT change the collation for pre-existing columns/data. There's only one way to do that:

Create a brand new empty database in the...

Even 16 hours is way too long. I had a 3TB database that I used to administer that took significantly less than that to backup - and that using...

Yes, we need unicode. We have international/multilingual customers so it's a must.

at minimum, you need to update the statistics. best bet is to rebuild the indexes.