OK. It only bothers me when I read a stinky article that I want to slam No big deal. I was just curious really.

Don't put the cluster on the GUID.

Experimentation is the key. Just a swag, put the cluster on the date column and then, depending on the manner in which the...

Since you're doing deletes, you're probably going to get some blocking no matter what you do. First off, I'd look into eliminating the WHERE IN & WHERE NOT IN queries....

Check this knowledge base article on MSDN:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/321185

SELECT  SERVERPROPERTY('productversion'), SERVERPROPERTY ('productlevel'), SERVERPROPERTY ('edition')

Some indication of the code being called would help.

Hard topic to quantify. The one point I'd add is that mediocre or not, you basically have people falling roughly into two groups. Those that have a year or two...

Yow! What a question. Well, everyone has their own opinions. What's more, every situation is a little different. I'm working on an article right now for Simple-Talk on just this...

I'm sorry, I'm not sure. I just did the same thing you described and it worked fine.

Then you sir, are a gentleman and a scholar. I'm neither. Pass the hammer please.

sp_who2 is a simple way to see which processes are running. It shows the SPID. You can use that to kill a process.

I'm not sure if this is the answer...

Yeah, you'll need to change the app. The methods for accessing system metadata within SQL 2005 are different than they were in 2000. The views that look like the old...

That completely depends on your environment. For example, we have a server environment where some 3rd party apps are running that need 'sa' log-in in order to operate (can I...

Nope, sorry. Common Table Expressions are new in 2005.

I read this yesterday and wasn't sure what you're looking for. Would a common table expression work? This is derived from BOL:

WITH TableX AS

   (SELECT e.ManagerId, e.EmployeeId, 0 AS Level

   ...

If you run a query against the sys.sysobjects system view in the master db, do you still see it?

SELECT * FROM sys.sysobjects

WHERE NAME = 'sp_executesql'

If so, note the type. It's...