Nice work! Pretty comprehensive list, I've used most of these xp's in the past.

Excellent Question!

Nice work Kevin!

The compress backups feature will come in handy in many environments - certainly will save space.

One question - I didn't see metrics for restoring. I'd be interested in...

All good, but in general, using Select * is a bad idea, even if you need all of the columns. Better to specify in case someone changes something in...

There may be a few instances where functions can speed things along, I've found most of the time they hinder performance instead of helping it.

The times they've been useful to...

Yah I got burned on this one too 🙁

I've had a similar problem - ended up resolving the problem as follows:

1) save the data as csv

2) create the table with the correct datatypes before importing.

That worked for me,...

Steve,

Well done!

Having worked as a developer, I've been on both sides of this.

While working at a bank, I was asked to do pretty much the same thing, fed the same...

Excellent Article!

The operations guides and checklists Microsoft offers are pretty helpful, especially the one for setting up clustering.

Interesting question! Be better to use the same backup if you can.

I guess one could be to tape and one could be to disk though....

I'm waiting for the WII version.

Haha! Happy April Fools day!

When I was researching the problem I did see alot of references to seeing a similar issue with SAN and/or Disk drivers. Might want to make sure you have...

Cade,

True - but not in this case. They actually used a TEXT field for the 'value' part......

Mark

Looking forward to part 2.

I inherited a DB like this - using name value pairs. Biggest drawback: Performance!