When I am in a "work" environment, I call myself a DBA. If I am in a "non-work" environment, I call myself a "computer geek." When I am with friends...

I think you make a very good point about which people companies "select" to go to TechEd. Oftentimes, this is more of a political decision than one based on who...

I am very impressed with the high quality of the input on my guest editorial.

As I have read over the feedback so far, there seems to be several common themes,...

One one consulting job I worked, the company had one database per customer. The database schema for each was identical, and each database was 5 MB or less. The problem...

I have actually made this same mistake myself, more than once. It is not always easy to remember to delete the old file.

dwagnon (6/25/2008)

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Thank you all for your help. ...

Here are some resources that might help:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/2005/technologies/dbm_best_pract.mspx

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/2005/dbmirror.mspx

Based on my experience, mirror-related wait states do increase as you mirror more databases, but how much is too much...

The concept of "out of site, out of mind" has come up several times in this discussion, and I think it is an interesting topic, although I don't have any...

I strongly support the idea of investing in yourself as much as you can. It is very difficult to keep up with ever-changing technology, and you need to be a...

Keeping mdb and ldf files on separate physical disks is considered a best practice.

See:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms187858.aspx

for information on how to attach and detatch database and log files.

While the specific syntax...

If you are running on a SAN, you will need the performance tools provided by the SAN vendor.

If you are using direct storage, then Performance Monitor will provide you with...

It has been my experience that you can't relay on System Monitor counters for SANS. Instead, you need to use the performance monitoring tools provided by your SAN vendor to...

The SQL Server General Statistics Transaction counter is not what you want to be using, as it does not track all transactions. Instead, use the SQLServer: SQL Statistics: Batch Requests/Sec...

SQL Server 2005 provides failover clustering support so that you can use multiple disks for one or more SQL Server instances. Failover clustering is supported only for the report server...

I have a specialized DBA version of the "flux capacitator" installed in my Honda. 😛

george sibbald (6/20/2008)

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on seeing the date on Brads editorial, it seems the best way to save...

I had forgotten about this piece of advice. I can remember many times not following it, and I ended up wasting my time.

Steve Jones - Editor (6/20/2008)

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And if you don't...