Now that's a really hard answer. A SAN should, in theory, perform almost as well as a RAID system, but with a lot more redundancy, safety, blah, blah, blah. BUT,...

Then, if you're not going to get one of the third party tools mentioned above, you should look at a solution using PowerShell or TSQL. Personally, for something like this,...

Huge discussion onging about ER tools right here: http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/FindPost588361.aspx

Short answer, Visio, without additional tools, is for documenting small database entity relationship diagrams. ERWin is an enterprise scale er diagraming and...

Barkingdog (10/21/2008)

>>>>

But we've been doing our physical design work more and more without the ER tool and simply plugging it right into code from day one

>>>>

do you mean you...

How's this for synchronicity. We're having this discussion and I see that Buck Woody has a post up on his blog about ER tools. http://blogs.msdn.com/buckwoody/archive/2008/10/20/erd-designer.aspx.

I'd like to comment, but...

It's especially egregious because it doesn't simply want a copy of VS or even the Team System, or the Database Edition of the Team System, but the ever-lovin ENTERPRISE version....

I can only use Visio for documentation. From the help file:

This version of Visio can't forward engineer your database model. In other words it can't use a database model you...

Several of the Red Gate people haunt these forums. Hopefully they'll pick it up & run with it. Contact them and offer your services. I'd like to see a cheaper...

I'm sure you can move the backups, but I don't think you move the logs. I see Quorum there. That usually means a cluster. Which further means that all the...

Also, if you can, post the actual execution plan. This can show where you have missing or incorrect indexes, indicate the possibility of out of date statistics... all useful stuff...

Do you mean compare the data or compare the structures?

Rachel is right, Red Gate & Apex both offer great tools for doing either of these operations. I prefer the Red...

You're not...

You'll have to drop and recreate the primary key. Which means if the table is acting as the parent in referential constraints, you'll need to drop and recreate those references...

Considering the size of the table, yeah, I'd suggest a defrag. I wouldn't necessarily do a rebuild at with an index this size and this level of fragementation, but it's...

I think you're a bit confused by online & offline. Neither one requires access to the database to be stopped. The offline option only heavily, negatively, affects the creation of...