Be aware that you cannot have a SQL Server Indexed View of an Oracle table. You must first import the data into a standard SQL Server table.

After you have...

You could also take a look at a Technet subscription. The Professional Download-only subscription costs about GBP £250 in year 1, and about GBP 200 to renew. This...

Merge Replication can be great when you get it to work smoothly, but getting it to work can be more hassle than some organisations will put up with. It...

The SQL Express install media does not include components that must be installed before the SQL install. The server edition media does include these components.

Before installing SQL 2008 Express...

How fast is your server? If you are running a guest machine with minimal CPU, memory and slow disk access you can get all sorts of problems when installing...

If you can set things up so that all your writes go to one server, you will have a MUCH simpler environment. One of the pains of Merge Replication...

The DBA of a production system will have rights to see all atabase objects.

If you use 'encrypted' stored procedures and functions, the DBA will not be able to view the...

You can do this...

BEGIN TRANSACTION

LOCK TABLE...

SELECT...

UPDATE...

COMMIT

This is a VERY bad way to use a database (SQL or DB2). Your planned approach does not make best use of DB2 facilities,...

If you have 8 CPU sockets and each socket has a CPU with 1 core plus hyperthreading, then you must be running on old kit.

You will find it cheaper to...

Service SIDs have been around since Windows 2008 but I have found very little information about them.

What I do know is that the SQL install will create the Service SIDs...

When you get everything working again, it is time to think about what your objectives were in doing this work.

There are no integrity or performance advantages in moving master, model...

If you have 2007-vintage hardware and run Windows 2008 R2 on it then you may find little change in performance.

But if you have 2007-vintage hardware then it is at end...

I have not done this type of license upgrade, but what you said looks reasonable: take backups, shut down SQL, apply OS license change, reboot, start up as normal.

I would...

I suggest you run the .Net 3.5 installation before you run the SQL 2008 installation, and plan what you would do if the .Net install fails.

One of the most error-prone...

From the KB947021 article...

Make a dependency in the mounted volume disk resource that specifies the disk that is hosting the mount point folder. This makes the mounted volume dependent on...