David, Im surprised you're so late joining the agile movement! But pleased nonetheless!

I'm a huge fan of Scrum. XP is interesting, but is seriously rigid. By comparison Scrum is a...

Better didactic than diabolical! I appreciate the compliment!

As far as numbers vs chars, it falls into 'it depends'. In general the smaller the column the more effective the index. It's...

I'm reasonably pro identity, and pro uniqueidentifier as well, especially now that we have newsequentialid().

When we had Celko in town for a visit his chief complaint about identities was that...

The problem with doing the con call and then asking for questions is that short of implementation specific questions (do I get one gold star or two if Im good?)...

I think most businesses 'get' that IT isn't just a loss center even if it looks that way on the P&L. Those that don't implement stuff like chargebacks and start...

I've bookmarked that to take a look at it more detail when I have time! You should also post in the scripts area, more likely to be found there.

Absolutely we need SQL 2000 SP5 & SQL 2005 SP3!

I don't see why customer need should be the driving reason. If you've fixed any significant number of bugs we should...

Ideally you need to block them for the few seconds you need. You might try issuing a DENY on the table as part of the switch code, kill any existing...

I like Scrum and find it to be a useful and usable approach, at least for small teams where I've used it.

Bryant, thanks for the comments and compliment. Everyone needs to find their own formula, but it's worth spending some time to 'war game' the process from all sides before you...

Humble, you're right on the money - if the chain of command doesn't support it, damned hard to make it work. More often they want to, but seem to run...

Richard, I agree that the key issue is keeping the focus on the needed, not the wanted. I don't blame anyone for wanting to work on the "interesting" stuff, but...

I agree a real tracking system is a must. I vote for the cheapest & easiest one you can buy. We built ours at the time and I consider that...

Andy, I totally agree - better to know than not! Have to overcome the core fear of admitting the problem, but it's a great way to reduce stress just having...

You can see benefits in two different ways. One is as you suggested is to put the partitions on different filegroups (which need to be on different physical drives for...