Yeah, I'd absolutely go with the tables too. It's the single easiest, most direct, most efficient way to maintain data integrity. It's the very reason you're using a relational engine...

If the purpose of each SELECT is to be used as the source for an UPDATE, probably you'll be better off doing each SELECT/UPDATE pair together. You'll need to careful...

And, there's a free tool from Red Gate Software called SQL Search[/url] that can help with this kind of thing.

I would not recommend disabling parallelism. It's a good thing. I would suggest that you bump up the default value for the cost threshold for parallelism. The default value of...

Cause in the microsecond from you finishing killing all the sessions and then setting the database to single_user, another connection came in and took it over.

Instead of changing it to single user mode, what about changing it to restricted user mode. Then only sa or dbo will be an issue and if you've set up...

For licensing details, go to Microsoft, always.

As to performance, in my experience, they're really about the same. There aren't any really insanely radical differences within the query engine between the...

Since that's all going to be part of a single transaction, you're very likely going to see all sorts of blocking, not just at the row level, but possibly at...

Powershell is a great tool for doing that. I think Kendal Van Dyke may have written a script that's available online. Just do a search for it.

If you're happy with the performance, there's nothing you need to do.

If a query is using a lot of resources, then it could impact, or be impacted by, other queries....

If you need to do something programmatic and you can't use SSIS, I'd suggest looking into PowerShell.

Full backups and log backups are completely decoupled. You shouldn't have to worry about that at all. What you do have to worry about is if you run differential backups....

SQL Server has a tool built into it called SQL Agent. It runs as a separate service. One of it's uses is to schedule things for SQL Server to do....

The key, the whole key, and nothing but the key, so help me Codd.

When you define a key, that's what you have to use.

Now, if the two columns that you're...

Interesting question. I did a couple of simple tests where I did a TOP, without an ORDER BY since you didn't say there was one. The estimated costs were roughly...