yes and no to the sp question - if you code effectively then yes. Indexing is the main key, or I should say efficient useful indexes, they will speed your...

3 million rows is a pretty small table to be honest. You might want to consider partitioning but I'm not sure you'll see much benefit.

I don't quite follow the replication...

On the other hand - are you asking because you have problems ? if not then there's always the old addage " if it aint broke don't fix it"

It's worth...

If you have dynamic memory set then the usage of memory will fluctuate. I'm concerned thta you say Gb's, if you are useing AWE then you must fix the min...

You need to have a baseline from which you can work, otherwise it's just a guess. The ms book sql server 2000 tuning is a good place to start. isbn...

Raid 5 degrades performance only where there are lots of writes, and to be fair you can to a certain extent offset this with lots of memory, if database oprtations...

I'd do a checkdb - or is it newalloc on 7.0 ? and I'd try backing up to another drive.

One slight error concerning Litespeed, there is a ( free ) utility which allows you to restore a litespeed backup on a a non litespeed server.

If you forget the GUI...

An interesting point about the indexes, but I doubt the optimiser would look at a secondary index defined on a clustered index ( where they are both identical in columns...

a view - well there's a thing - this well may be your problem - try replacing it with a function - or put the actual tables in the proc...

Been there - the views are fine and everything works spot on when the queries are not parameterised - it appears to me that the optimiser is unable to select...

If the indexes are duplicates then the non clustered or non PK's should be removed.

You have checked the columns in the indexes are identical  using for example, sp_helpindex tablename ...

aaarrghhhh!!! If it's paralellism then it will show clearly in the plan(s).

Why buy a smp box and then restrict the procs ?

You really have to examine your query plan to fine tune the query - I recommend the book SQL Server 2000 performance tuning isbn 0-7356-1270-6  as a start.

There are lots...

I'm not sure exactly what you're asking but ... first off you should index the columns that are used in the join statements of your query. Then consider indexes on...