Sadly P2P requires Enterprise Edition

Testing for sysadmin is not really the right thing to do in this case. Best practice is to use the lowest possible permissions needed to complete a task.

The permission...

If you are going Active/Active, then it may be worth looking at SQL P2P replication. We decided to use P2P instead of clustering when we moved to AWS.

P2P needs...

IMHO moving a system database on a test server can be a useful part of educating yourself in how SQL Server works, what can break, and what needs to be...

This page http://sqlserverfinebuild.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Install%20SQL%20Books%20Online%20Update has detail on how you can get the SQL 2012 books online installed on your server.

A sabbatical is about taking time out of your normal routine to do something productive that you could not normally do.

I think you are starting well, putting some...

Sorry, I did mean Id = 3 !!!

Can you SELECT * FROM sysdatabases and see if you have a database with an ID of 2. If you have, this DB is being used as the model...

As Jeff and aaron have said, data integrity can be the main issue with document storage, regardless of what people may say about performance.

With Filetable storage, I think you can...

You can get your Windows people to grant the Service Start/Stop right for the SQL Agent service to the DBA Windows group. You can then use any of the...

Master and resource contain details of the patch level relating to the SQL Server program files and other instance-unique details.

If you did have a shared master, then you are locking...

There are advantages and disadvantages to storing documents actually within the database.

If you look just at performance, storing files under 1MB in size generally gives faster access to the file...

There are a number of issues that can cause this situation.

A Google search on 'Orphan MSDTC Transaction' will give you a number of references about potential causes and how to...

All I can say is on a busy server any SQL install, but especially a cluster install, can take a long time.

The SQL cluster install process does a lot of...

The SQL Server install will always add about 3.5GB of files to the system drive. Most of these go into the GAC, which can only exist on the system...