I've used sql diagnostic manager for 8 years now ( from when it was caleld sql probe ) I consider it to be the best available product. I also have...

I'm a strong believer in keeping current with patches and fixes, to a certain degree relevant to what's happening with my servers, however I do go through a staged deployment,...

I still think the admin training course is a good place to start - I'm imagining having the inside sql 2005 books on my desk along with my first experience...

if you actually have to bring back an entire table, and yours is pretty small compared to some I've dealt with, then there's not much you can do. At some...

I find not all filters quite work as you'd expect, and some give downright strange results - filtering by text seems to work usually and I use this if I...

I agree with Jeff too - that's a pretty poor excuse, no-one can verify that your systems wouldn't have problems with a service pack or patch - that's what DBA's...

I currently work to a minimum of 3186 ( no idea where that fits between cu4 and cu5 ) but this is because I know it should fix particular issues...

"The only good backup is one that has been sucessfully restored" If you want to check backups restore them, absolutely nothing else guarantees a backup.

you can check the registry seting for this if you're not sure.

that does seem a bit strange - after restoring your 2000 database are you then setting compat to 9.0.

Do you have an index maint plan which changes...

I think you'll find sql server and exchange make changes to this setting when they are installed. I've been looking into server config, especially x64 and this is something I've...

yes I think you may find this in either sql2008 or ? SQL2010, currently in sql2005 it does nothing.

the answer to this is very simple and I'm surprised sometimes that its not so well known. HT threads run at less "power" than a core, say around 70% less...

It's one of those situations you need to view to be able to make a more informed suggestion. Your tempdb spid is blocking itself, that suggests possible parallelism issues.

How big...

I suspect that may be tricky as I've found trying to do anything with system tables almost impossible with sql 2005 , not always for the best. The DAC will...