As Noel says it's all a matter of cost vs complexity. When most people state 100% availability what they actually mean is always available during working hours - or something....

select

serverproperty('ComputerNamePhysicalNetBIOS')

will give you the name of the current node, for a non clustered server it returns...

as I say , more spindles and raid 10 will improve things. Changing to 15k scssi disks would work wonders mind, a 15k disk will support maybe twice the i/o...

right click on table in MS and script to create as new query.

There are some good books available on sql 2005 !!

From my view this was one of the not so good features of sql server 2005 as it allows for "woolly" data definitions.

My preference would always be to allocate the size...

How do you mean performaing badly, what metrics are you using to make this assumption?

I would only ever expect a scan on deleted, if the table is small ( a...

well .. indexes on join columns and sargs may help, depends upon the size of the tables. You might want to try a few compound indexes to cover the sargs.

well yes and no - you can select them all through EM I believe, or just write a loop in T SQL. You have to apply each log in turn...

If the optimiser doesn't consider the query needs a parallel execution then it will not use one no matter how hard you try!! 

You'll have hyperthreading which is why sql server sees 4 procs - this is normal and good ( don't let anyone tell you to turn off hyperthreading it works fine...

yup easy, create a clustered index ( on the desired column of the table ) then remove the clustered index.

I'd seriously advise about tables without integrity constraints - but that's...

porting your problems to 2005 is quite good. The tuning advisor is very good I understand.

I normally use Teratrax or Diagnostic Manager to collect worst performing then use a test...

please don't multiple post.

Well, having been down this route a number of times I can make one essential suggestion - keep it simple!

I always go for table partitioning as first point. If...

Hmmm, that's very harsh! Tuning is an art which takes some time to learn as is very obvious from the postings in the various forums. It's all so much easier...