Does your organisation use an accounts package? This type of thing should be covered by the package.

There are significant business risks in organisations writing their own accounts systems. ...

I agree with Michael but would add I would also put Reporting Services on a different box. SSRS in 2000 and 2005 needs IIS in order to run, and...

Wiping data is just a process to achieve an objective. What is your objective? What is the justification for the objective?

Sometimes managers say they want data wiped so...

I questioned this with PSS many months ago and was told that maintenance for SQL Server 2000 has been stabilised and ther are no plans to issue a further hotfix...

Also, do not shrink the database. Shrinking a database after doing a re-index does 2 things:

1. It gives you bad NTFS file fragmentation that harms your performance. This...

IMHO the whole issue of data retention is something our industry is underestimating.

In the old days (before SOX, etc) it was relatively safe to copy old data to tape, send...

Have you tried isolating the problem?

* Does the problem occur on other tables

* Does the problem occur when you try the process interactively using SSMS

* Does the problem occur when...

Not much help to you, but I have had no issues with this on x64 or x86. Hopefully someone who uses IA64 can share their experiences.

SQL Server picks up time and date information from the operating system.  If your operating system is behaving correctly then nothing needs to be done for SQL Server to work...

For a reason best known to themselves, Microsoft have decided that transaction log bacukps of master are not possible.

It is possible to do transaction log backups of msdb, provided that...

I thought this would be easy - just replace the SaveToStorageFile method with the method to save to VB.  Except there is no method to save to VB.

I found a...

Has your company looked at boot-level encryption tools such as Pointsec?  The organisation I work for uses Pointsec on all company laptops.  You need to supply a password at boot time to...

Have you looked at the hardware diagnostics?  It may just be you have a faulty component.  Even if the hardware log is clear, your HP engineer should have some programs...

am, if you have not come across Jamie before, he is a world expert on SSIS so his advice is good. 

Although some ETL tools are more sophisticated or performant...

Our policy is that all DBAs are members of a specific Windows domain group.  We make this group a member of sysadmin, and then we remove the BUILTIN/Administrators account.  We...