If I really want to see the plans I use profiler with showplan - mind you can't print that either !!

I've never found the licensing has any physical effect on the server, it6's more for licensing server - if you're running that it might be relevent - mainly for audit...

In considering an index choice the optimiser will not use a composite index unless the first column of the index occurs within the query. So the short answer is your...

printing plans is always a pain - I often grab a screenshot and print that. You could try resizing the plan, right click in the plan window and choose a...

Any fragmentation within a table itself cannot be removed without a clustered index. If you don't want a clustered index on your table just add one and remove it, your...

I'm told by a colleague who uses 64bit amd procs that his servers fly. I asked ms about 32 vs 64 bit and they said it's like comparing eggs and...

Try from another workstation or create a virtual PC to test the client. Try to another server or virtual server to check the server. ( always best to have at...

You can defrag most system tables and from a purist point of view there can be good reason to do so. Fragmentation is bad so if it can be removed...

Yup I'd be willing to consider parallelism - seen it done it and been there !!! There is one other obscure possibility - are the collations identical on the servers...

There are instances when the sql counters don't start - check sysperfinfo and see if its populated, if it isn't your sql counters are not working. There's also something about...

I think if you read the readme for sp4 you'll find it's considered an enhancement of reporting. I just happened to scan though it looking for something else today .....

Yup sorry missed the tran too .. you can still do the batches in transactions. Big transactions are a pain - always were in 6.x and still aren't much better....

I've found when moving large amounts of data batching tends to do it quicker, and usually setting the batch as a stored proc and calling it multiple times is quicker...

I don't think it too unreasonable to have 4gb of ram with sql standard. 3 gb would probably be best but quite often the memory comes this way with new...

use disk idle time and subtract from 100 - it's more accurate.

monitor i/o completion time. I'd suspect that the query isn't too good. Note that if you're using xml stuff...