From BOL:

READPAST can be specified for any table referenced in an UPDATE or DELETE statement, and any table referenced in a FROM clause. When specified in an UPDATE statement, READPAST...

Are the tables on the SQL Server or a network share?  The account SQL Server is running under must have access to the files, and if your server is running...

CASE is not a flow-of-control statement in T-SQL, it is a function.  Therefore it is used within another statement to provide a value, it doesn't begin a block of statements. ...

Have you tried using locking hints?  I would test it with

    UPDATE Example WITH(ROWLOCK, HOLDLOCK, READPAST)

This should tell each process to lock the five rows it is working with, hold...

It is obvious that the perfomance of any server will be affected by the number of simultaneous users.  But 150-200 users is not too many for Standard edition.

Look at the...

Try clicking on the Quest Software ad at at the top of this forum page.

PS: Permission issues aside, what's so complicated about typing "BACKUP DATABASE <db> TO DISK='\\server\share\xxxx.BAK' "?

SQL Server can backup to anywhere on the network that it has permission to write to.  It is true that if you use Enterprise Manager to run the backup the...

A brief intro to SQL 2005 partitioning: First you create a partition function, which declares a list of boundary values for the partitions.  Then you create a partition scheme which...

A better way is to synchronize the SIDs across your servers so backup/restore or detach/attach will work without cleanup.  There are a number of threads on this site that will...

I'm not sure how the function will work with multiple rows, I get a duplicate key error when I try it.

Maybe if it was implemented as a CLR function and...

Noel, you're confusing me.  "A sequence table is the right idea", but "It is not my preferred way"?  So there's another way you prefer that's better than the ones posted,...

Yes, this is a much easier problem if you just use an integer identity field.  You could create a view using "STUFF(CAST(invoice_id as char(8)),3,0,'-') as invoice_id" for anything that insists...

I think this code solves the problem of concurrent inserts.  One SELECT is used to generate the new invoice id, but if another user manages to sneak it in first the...

I can't think of a good reason why you wouldn't upgrade the client tools, since you already upgraded the servers.  I don't think a registry hack will solve the problem.