I think the point at which the "throttle" become noticeable depends on what you are doing with the database.

I've had over 25 users on bog standard Access 2.0 but all...

If you are going to use a case statement in your WHERE clause, I would put one in your SELECT as well to warn you that field2 is zero.

I did consider writing some matching functions for SQL Server having written a number of deduplication programs.

In the end I shyed away from it because it involves heavy string manipulation...

 I know you don't have to specify the owner, but MS made a big song and dance about it being best practice.

I am also a fan of Metaphone.  The guy who wrote it (Lawrence Phillips) went on to work for Verity, the search engine people so that should tell you something.

Unfortunately...

I have to admit outsourcing scares me witless.

In the States it may have been the case of someone working for US$7/hour instead of US$10/hour but outsourcing to India means competing...

Try full text indexing

A primary key defaults to a clustered index, but you can choose explicitly not to cluster it.

I'm pretty sure that a a primary key is needed for certain types of replication.

I'm...

How many Mb does 9 Million records represent?

If you run the following query

SELECT SUM(Length)

FROM SysColumns

WHERE ID=Object_Id('dbo.<<your table name>>')

You will get a very crude idea of your record length.

Multiply this by...

How big is the phsical TEMPDB log file?

Is it set to autogrow?

Good article!

One thing I'm not sure of is where you would use CREATE STATISTICS.

I know indices maintain their own statistics but if you do a query using an ORDER BY,...

I seem to remember on of the Brians posting something to the affect that physical file defrag was of limited use if you database was on a RAID 5 array...

CREATE RULE rl_BeforeNow AS @dtDate < GETDATE()

The date thing is an absolute pain

I have standardised on using yyyy-mm-dd as my date format in my applications and therefore my SQL always...

I take your point on upscaling webservers.  I wish I knew more on the infrastructure side.  Come to think of it, I wish I knew ANYTHING on the infrastructure side