dtc is usually pretty good at putting up an error message which is why I didn't list it, however, anything is possible!

as I said, a conspiracy to change us to americanised english !!  I've always found that keeping to the three date types works well, the other is odbc time.  to...

vs performance? No contest I'm afraid. With the growing size of disks and adoption of SAN technology the bean counters look more and more at storage as something to be...

hmm - my simple tests showed no relation between results and actual profiler trace.

I can only generalise about maxdop settings as any given situation may vary!! On a 4 way dual core ( with no HT ) when I had parallelism issues with...

generally the default options on install of sql 2005 does not allow remote access, you must configure sql 2005 to allow this. Check in BOL under installation.

the other two are...

I don't know how many rows this query returns but I figure it needs tuning. Why it times out I've no idea, proably a high cost plan / and/or loading...

can't say I've ever used this feature, and having run a few samples not sure of what value it is.

I'm not aware of this being available in 2005.

there's also a few threads on msdn forums, some errors are fixed in sp1.

One suggestion is to change the data type of the column or add/remove nulls. Make it work...

I'd also try dbcc updateusage(0) in the database.

Are the collations all the same

I'm not aware that there is a sql server install of British English, part of the plot to replace s with z and make us all speak as if we...

if you're making use of linked servers you should have some idea of the most basic steps to check a failure!!

• Can you login to the remote box directly as the...

check your user has a valid login on the correct databsae on sql 2005 , make sure the 2005 is running in mixed mode. ( e.g. can you login to the...

what did you have in mind?

You can run in 2000 mode initially. The most likely issue you might have is with how the optimiser works ( it's slightly different )...

you might want to check for cxpacket waits - suspect parallelism may be blocking. Try adding a maxdop 1 hint to your query.