This is an interesting article, which left me scratching my (SQL 2000) head over the syntax. Once I had that straight and looked up ROW_NUMBER in the Books Online I...

Checkpointing is a process where all the "dirty pages" (changed data) are written to the disk. It is described fairly well in the SQL help.

The main cause of issues around...

No flame wars please, but in my experience, as a rule of thumb, never never use SAN for databases.

NAS on the other hand is great!

The network stack is not the...

Sorry - I never answered that part!

No, not as far as I am aware of!

I'm not sure I'm understanding what you need, but lets see if this works!

SELECT table_1.id,table_1.Description, table_2.date1,table_2.date2

FROM table_1

LEFT OUTER JOIN (SELECT table_2.id, MAX(table_2.date1) AS MaxDate1 FROM table_2 GROUP BY table_2.id)...

Are you sure about your disc config - Two disks in RAID 5 doesn't sound right to me!

I have to agree that the problem you are seeing is disc queue...

I marginally prefer my version... Its a little shorter

Needs comments I know, but the parameters are exactly the same

CREATE FUNCTION fn_MyPadding (

@TextAS VARCHAR(500),

@CharAS CHAR(1),

@HowManyAS INT,

@LeftRightAS CHAR(1) = 'L')

RETURNS VARCHAR(500) AS...

I've got to say that I'm rapidly going over to the dark side and sticking an Identity column in every table.

More often than not I can identify a natural key...

I'm amazed that no-one has mentioned this so far, given that they are the sponsor/owner of this site!

Take a look at SQLCompare from RedGate.

This has some very nice features, including...

The other solution you might try would be to look at the locking for the INSERT statement.

if this was restricted to a ROW level lock (rather than page or table)...

And once again I am struck by the reminder NEVER to let a Network Admin or Sys Admin near my database disks!

Databases always want LOTS of physical disks.

Log files should...

OK - I'll at my $0.02 to this one!

The most spectacular instance of "lack of brain" for me occurred a few years ago. We were replacing our 8CPU Alpha servers...

While I sympathise with this approach, I think that we are setting a bad example to the future generations of IT Professionals.

Let me preface the rest of this email by...

I hate to nit-pick... but I'm going to anyway!

Given that this is not a multi-extent database (there is only a db and bi rather than db, d1, b1 etc), the early...

Amusingly, I actually had worked out that it was over budget but decided that since it was the ONLY configuration that gave sufficient usable space it had to be the...