Nice article, Tom. Thanks for sharing that solution. I'm passing it on to our OpsMgr admin to see if he can use it.

Just the System Monitor counters is all I've ever had available. I use Operations Manager to collect those now, but you could just use Performance Monitor.

SSIS does do a great job. You can also run the script manually and output the results to a file through Management Studio. You can also use sqlcmd.exe to run...

But that assumes you're not worrying about extended character sets. Wouldn't that muck with international data?

CHAR or VARCHAR is one half the size of NCHAR or NVARCHAR.

The N designates the data type as unicode which stores at twice as much data for each character.

Use good indexes, especially the clustered index. Look into partitioned tables where appropriate. Use partitioned views where appropriate. Only denormalize where you can guarantee a tested performance benefit. Test everything...

OK. Well, that was useless.

Hmmm... If we were comparing reads of 10000 rows of VARCHAR to NVARCHAR, I wouldn't be surprised by a two-fold increase in speed. I'm a little...

Oh, I've got one of those for the dog... it'll work.

I'd be more interesting in seeing the execution plan from the query.

Thanks. Great description of automatic statistic maintenance, although it's for SQL Server 2000. Here's the BOL entry for 2005. There are a few differences, but nothing major.

I guess I wasn't...

Start here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms191007.aspx

Move on to here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms177499.aspx

You've got two options. Set up TRY/CATCH and then return the error message that you want the user to see:

BEGIN TRY

RAISERROR('Major error in TRY...

And possibly introduced others.

You do know that NOLOCK can cause duplicate data to be displayed, not just data that's in flux? I think that after FAST 1, NOLOCK is...

Maybe I'm dense (ok, I am, but humor me), but if you're the one creating the temporary tables, don't you know the column names already?

Since you are new to this, please take a piece of advice.

Don't use dynamic SQL.

Especially since you're just getting started. Do the work to figure out how to...