god help us!  I don't know who told you this but I'd suggest you don't take any further advice < grin >

Strong data typing is an essential key foundation stone...

this is just far too general a question - read some of the other threads for pointers.

I'd suggest appropriate training, buy some books, and look through the articles written on...

You'll perhaps wish you didn't ask < grin > I've a partitioned table which exists in two dedicated filegroups , each partition of the table is in a dedicated filegroup, this...

haven't done this for a quad core but experience tells me the answer is yes, based upon dual cores with HT, had 32 threads on a server.

I personally would avoid them like the plague!  It could be useful to define a postcode data type ( in the UK ) as a char(8) but I remain unconvinced.

sql licensing is per socket not per core.

Having been within a project that failed big time, maybe £10 million down the drain and lots of jobs lost,from CIO down it's not an easy call.

What I'd probably...

You really need to have a read up on indexes as your basic assumptions are missplaced.

The optimiser will choose the best plan, that doesn't mean you know better < grin...

don't use triggers!! Triggers will always degrade performance especially in an oltp database. Find another way.

most sql books have chapters on profiler, I imagine there's a fair bit on technet/msdn. The sql performance tuning guide ( for sql 2000 ) has a good chapter on...

table partitioning is used to partition data, which in turn may help performance, sounds to me more likely you need better indexing. btw views are generally the quickest way to...

as with all things it depends upon what the load will be!

Usually a reporting server is high in reads which means you might be able to use raid 5, however...

Tuning queries is best achieved without hints, use hints and you may find with sp2 your query doesn't work well any more. I don't agree that you always need to...

This is another repeating post we seem to constantly run and rarely get any feedback as to why the differences.  identical databases on identical servers will run the same. Any...

the drop in page life expectancy shows thta the data cache is insufficient and you're swopping lots of data, or flushing the data cache almost continuously. That you're seeing physical...