Outside of the SQL Server world, deduplication of data in backups is big business. It is the way that large organisations are making $M savings on storage costs.

But this...

You do this via Management Studio.

For xp_cmdshell, right-click on your instance name in the Object Explorer window and select Properties. You specify the xp_cmdshell settings on the Security tab.

For...

One possible scenario: Somewhere in your system the password of a domain account is saved, and a process is trying to do work using this account and password. The...

I was going to say raise this as a problem with Microsoft, then I saw you had moved the servers from another node and hoped you had cleaned out all...

I would definitely ask WHY the SQL Agent tasks are prohibited. The answer needs to be more than 'the auditor said so', as this just shows the auditor probably...

I suggest you get Perry's documents, they look very comprehensive.

If you want to...

There are no short-cuts to knowing what is the best configuration for your installation. You need to try things out to gain experience of what works best, or hire...

There is an INSTANCEID parameter that is supposedly usable to set your own value for .1, .2, etc. The drawback is you only have one value per run of...

The auto-restart feature in Agent is to allow Agent to restart on unexpected failures. It is not needed to get Agent to restart after a Cluster failover. The...

There are numerous people who have reported they cannot install .Net 3.5 SP1 on top of a .Net 2.0 installation. Typically this can happen if there has been a...

One aspect you need to consider is DR. We used to hold user documents outside the database in the file system, but as the document count grew to a...

SSIS and SSAS are normally kept together on the same server if you are using SSIS to access SSAS.

Are you really asking about Reporting Services (SSRS)?

If you are...

In your situation I would warn my management of the risks and unknowns, and try to manage their expectations.

IMHO you have too many variables to predict performance, CPU and I/O...

Take a look at http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=64525 (To Blob or not to Blob) from Microsoft research.

On the machines used for this study, the paper shows that images under 256K are always processed...

Different people learn in different ways. Some need to see the thing happening before they understand. Some need to read the details before they understand. This means...