I'd suggest Itzik Ben-Gan's Inside SQL Server 2005: TSQL Querying. That's a great source for really learning how TSQL works and how to apply it to a lot of real...

Because you guys are running express, you actually have choices. I've got a machine with at least three versions of express from three different third party apps all running side-by-side...

My personal preference is document & fire, but I know that my company will go through counseling, remediation, more counseling, documentation, extra training, heart felt discusions, yet more counseling, more...

Adam Machanic (9/23/2008)

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Just keep thanking your lucky stars that they didn't choose EF... Here's a thread someone sent...

colin Leversuch-Roberts (9/22/2008)

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I was told on a couple of occasions that changing the threashold actually doesn't make much difference as the optimiser will over-rule your settings if it thinks best...

Adam Machanic (9/22/2008)

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Matt Miller (9/22/2008)

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Agreed. Still - my biggest objection to it is the separation of duties issue. Since we're back to putting what essentially boils down to...

Most of our production systems don't have multiple instances, but we do see that kind of contention in the dev & qa systems. If you do have multiple instances, it's...

There really isn't any. The thing to remember is, that prior to 2005, when you queried the system tables, you were querying the system tables. Since 2005, all the things...

Integrated monitoring with 2005 and earlier isn't that sophisticated. You could build your own process to do this. SQL Server 2008 has a monitoring mechanism that is much more sophisticated....

Based on a meeting earlier this week, a significant part of our developers consider database access the mostly costly and least productive part of their work. They're skipping LINQ and...

Chirag (9/19/2008)

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GilaMonster (9/18/2008)

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Chirag (9/18/2008)

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another way is to right click on the proc in SSMS and select view dependencies. It will show all objects that depend on the proc and...

Yes, that's it. Jeremy Brown described it well above.

My take. The optimizer doesn't decide on parallelism or not, it's the query engine. Any given query can have two execution...

You may also want to change the parallelism threshold. I've always found the default, 5, to be way too low. I've usually bumped it up to somewhere between 20 and...

Time to do a point in time recovery, if you can. If not, get a log browsing tool.

There's an introduction to exactly this here[/url].

There are a lot of drill down points you can make from there, but it generally covers the basics.