Hmm no idea how to compare rates, I'd always assumed rates were higher out of the UK, still I have no idea of living costs so tricky one.

yup the backup will clear the transactions, the used part of the log, from the log but it won't decrease the size of the ldf file.  Have a read in...

about  $1,900 per day on the current exchange rate .. my aim is to make that daily rate, can't tell you how far I'm off that currently < grin >

no blocking and deadlocks are very different .. you've got blocking I'd guess .. you have to speed up your updates and preferably stop table scanning on selects.  Failing that...

what - send you the consultants?  gladly.

A consultant ( £1000 per day + ) configured a major application which rolls out patches across enterprises ( like SMS used to )...

could you give some idea of the hardware and settings of your server, is it oltp or dw ?

I don't know where you get the info about auto stats updating every 20 mins for all tables - absolutely not so - auto update stats will occur ONLY for...

I enjoy Joe getting involved .. I might not always agree but you cannot ignore his knowledge or skills, sorry Robert !

I had a rant at the developers at one...

The issue with many of the counters is that they are server wide, there isn't the granularity, this is something I've raised with Microsoft as I too have suffered from...

There have been various posts concerning queries vs procs .. posting the code is no help as we don't have the tables or data. There are a number of set...

were the tools on a different machine, I know it was a w2003 sp but .. , worth pointing out that sql sp's should be applied to client tools only...

btw page splits might be a concern, but depends upon your application, if that average is for an entire day that probably is a problem, I typically see 0.0 for...

I can't believe I'm reading this post !!!  "The worst is the index scans, should be 977/s, industry standard according to a source"   what a load of cr*p !

I have...

possibly, the query will scan ( probably table ) thus any updates to that table will likely cause a delay in execution of the select. You already know the execution time...

sp_helpindex tablename  will list index details for a table

sp_autostats tablename  will list the names of stats, system stats and indexes

The inside sql xxx books contain good information on indexes.