for your 4 instances I'd probably set each to initially have max memory 3GB and min memory 2GB.

Note that should both your active nodes fail your passive will not...

OP ? In theory doing a select * may seem a solution, however having observed memory usage from many angles, including having 64GB of ram for 20GB database, a...

It's not as simple as that, and I'd seriously think about setting max memory for sql server to leave adequate space for the o/s. You may find with that level...

in as much as I can answer this without appearing to offend - if you're asking this question you probably shouldn't really be doing this.

I'd encourage you find out how...

I have to be honest I've never read so much or seen such wasted time over an issue that can be resolved with the addition of memory! In sheer terms...

Just one point that as the data is in cache you don't need indexes - I'd like to meet the person who suggested this gives performance - pah! Even if...

well your dev servers will support partitioning because dev edition is essentially enterprise. I'd happily run a test but I don't have a test server with std edition on, sorry.

I suppose you could always pad a bigint with a char string using a calculated column. Using rowversion won't technically port across servers and even a database which could give...

This method is not supported or recommended - although I've moved mdf and ldf files about similar to this. Don't forget the systemresource database.

I'd probably re-install sp2 as moving the...

unless you've made changes to model there's no point in restoring it. msdb is restored the same as any user database. I have never restored master on a cluster -...

I hate to say this but ... I would have thought x64 and awe were all nicely sorted by now, neither is exactly new technology are they.

First x64 - the...

I knew you'd be a voice of reason Jeff! I truly don't know any way you can do this in T-SQL and I'm not sure you could do this in...

much as I dislike VMs I have never encountered turning off parallelism, that could be a serious hit and I'm pretty sure this is untrue. I guess some vms may...

filegroups can be useful but you need to understand how your database works to use them.

sorry your question is a bit vague, I suggest you carefully read up BOL and the numerous articles written about partitioned views, it's not just a quesion of writing a...