Good point Jeff - not many users of MySQL, for example, know or care that it is Open Sauce, never mind ever look at the sauce code. Having said that,...

I think you need to read up on TCP/IP, DNS and the ping command. As a quick summary to point you in the right direction:

ping uses ICMP to send packets;...

Unfortunately, the vast majority of SPAM is just plain boring or stupid or both. I wish I did receive creative SPAM, but I can't recall a single one. Some phishing...

Simple way to verify you can talk with the local SMTP mailserver is to use telnet from a CMD window:

telnet (mailserver) 25

You will either get a 220 success,...

The simplest way to run a particular script in each and every database is:

exec sp_MSForEachDB 'use ?;exec sp_spaceused;'

However, this would run the script for all databases, not just your mirrored...

Then I suggest you identify the source of the time-out problem. It will affect your direct DB connection in just the same way as the file copy.

I also think a...

What strikes me, whenever I get a quote for new server hardware, is how insignificant the price of the CPU(s) and Memory is, compared to the whole package. Once I...

Thanks Gail, nicely summarised.

Depends on where the applications are located. But you are essentially correct - during a failover, the SQL Server stops on one node and starts on a new node. This...

Gail touched on this, but it is a very important point - with DB Mirroring, the application must support mirroring. Most commonly, by using an "SQL Native Client" odbc driver.

With...

how about using the Coldfusion function to copy the file from the remote HTTP Server onto the local server? Then import the file using the normal SSIS package. That way...

I suppose the same argument can be posed for a Disaster Recovery Site - how do you know that it really works, without actually doing a full failover? For most...

Ideally, you want to test that the particular port the Endpoint is mapped to, is available from the other server. Easiest way to test is to telnet to the port:

telnet...

Alternatively, you could dump the whole recordset into an array, and then work with the array. This is usually my preferred method. Just use:

RS.GetRows

You can then use UBound to calculate...

Thanks Gail, sorry I completely didn't realise that shrink database was one of the options! Absolutely agree, don't include it.