Yeah, that's part of our best practices check list too.

The only suggestion I can make is to assume that every problem has a set based solution up front. Then work on finding it. RBAR becomes a crutch. You just...

Seriously, why would physical column order matter? You can always get the columns out in any order that you want through views, procedures and functions.

My own experience and what I've been able to find, there isn't any way to directly access the reports themselves. They're not stored as .rdl files, which is what you'd...

It's brain candy, but tasty, John Birmingham's Final Impact. It's the third book in a trilogy (I truly hate that phrase, but they must be some kind of marketing thing,...

Excellent. Thanks. I'll work it in (if I still do it).

I finally got around to testing some more. I created three copies of an XML structure with almost identical data (I changed some of the key values between the three...

I'm not terribly up on the service broker, but a query is a query. If you've got the same query executing on both databases and everything else is equal, you'll...

Size is absolutely a major factor in determining experience. In addition to what Steve mentioned about backups, how you seperate out file storage, indexes, DBCC checks, data loads, reporting, statistics,...

The plan is showing missing statistics on columns. Are you sure auto-update & auto-create statistics are set to on in the bad database?

To get two different plans, something is not...

Best of luck.

Just remember, you don't have to be the best DBA in the world, just the best DBA in the room. If you know stuff and no one else...

You should also check silly things like the minimum or maximum memory configurations to be sure that something isn't different there. Also check the parallelism threshold and number of cpu's...

How often do you update the statistics on these two databases. I'll be they're out of sync. Also, do you do a regular re-index or index defrag? I'll bet there...

That drops linked servers on a local machine. That's not going to help with Express is it?

You're talking to the wrong guy. I'm posting this for our tech support guys. Luckily, I don't have to muck about in Express (yet). I'll try it out & get...