I've been using functions in tables this way for many years, used with care and probably not in highly transactional tables the advantages are great. I have also used this functionality...

I'd recommend this book as a start

http://www.compman.co.uk/scripts/browse.asp?ref=450145

adding more memory, say 32gb will aid performance by increasing the data cache size.

excluding raid 5 overhead every doubling of the number of available spindles doubles i/o performance.

No doubt you'll...

Raid 5 has effectively a 75% overhead for writes, for pure reads it is ok. If you need performance don't use raid 5, simple as that. I cringe every time...

I have a note in my selective index rebuild routine that states that for a clustered index rebuild a 3 page table did nothing but a 7 page table did....

the selectivity is the important factor, technically uniuqe is a property of the index. I guess in the search for suitable indexes the optimiser may consider a unique over a...

you'd gain most benefit by not applying shrinks.

You may have indexed views ? Covered or overlapping indexes may be present - it's not always possible to have one index covers all in a table and for performance...

Profiler can be a performance hit, so be careful, running it across the network to another server is useful but will hit network traffic. Be as minimal with the events...

Largely only datafile fragmentation is critical, assuming you have seperate drives/arrays/disks for data, logs, binaries.

The backups and tran logs will always fragment, you can't do much about backups but you...

I'd also advise a service restart after you've defined your tempdb data files to re-initialsie tempdb, it should work correctly then.

Sounds a very sensible solution to me.

If you are using multiple sql instances ( not vm or virtual servers ) then the memory for each instance, including default, should...

never had any problems making database backups of ( ms ) log shipping databases, scheduled nightly backups of databases, log shipping continued unaffected.

Raid 10 is good, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise!

It might be beneficial to consider an additional lun for data, in case you ever wish...

hierachies of views usually hide poor database design or an attempt to produce a dss solution on top of an oltp database ( instead of a physical reporting database )

I've...