My main use of xp_cmdshell is for log shipping, I use my own ( have since sql 6.0 ). Although I am looking to test using DFSR when we...

seconded - the best advice I ever had was " It just depends"

oh sorry when you say pages/sec I assume you mean the page file usage?

hmm - almost all of my kit is x64 so rules are different. You shouldn't really get a surge of io excpet from the disk/lun you're copying from (...

I have two DBA databases on each server which have "stuff" I use, tables, procs, config etc. etc.

I also have some procs/functions I deploy to master to assist me in...

I don't really think you can compare a network backup with file copy. as suggested you could try writing to multiple files - I found I could get more performance...

an indexed view is a different question/subject area.

my best suggestion is that you examine the query plans for your various queries, this way you'll hopefully get an understanding of what...

this is so difficult to answer .. i have to be diplomatic as we too have an outsourced data centre 🙂

Experience has shown that in certain circumstances the combination of...

If I need to use xp_cmdshell then I do - it depends upon client requests and their perception of course, There's always a certain amount of using what you have...

yes I've found network backups are slow ( windows not sql ) I never do network sql backups. The usual reason is network bandwidth - the average didk interface is...

I thought i had this one in my docs but it seems if I did I couldn't find it 🙂

Thanks for the answer, I'll make sure I keep this one...

ah, sorry should have said we were using Litespeed which allows you to define the number of cores/threads for the backup.

My backup using 8 threads on a 16 core 2.93GHz...

It depends why you might want to run dbcc updateusage. If when you run dbcc updateusage lots of internal values are updated then maybe it's useful.

The tricky thing with many...

correct - unless I've been getting it wrong all these years 🙂

have a look at the merge statement