Testing is your buddy. Lots and lots of testing. There is no true one-size-fits-all approach to doing things in SQL Server.

Since the clustered index itself redefines data storage, the choice...

I'd just jump in and start using XE. First, there is no way of completely avoiding the XML. It's fundamental to the process. However, I recently wrote a blog...

The failover will cause disconnects on the application side. That's unavoidable. However, the overall down time will be very small. In flight transactions will be lost. All committed transactions will...

CTL-Z

That's undo. It ought to help you. It will immediately undo the last action. If you've done others, it's too late.

Another option, just close the tab. No need to restart...

I really don't want to get into an online p*****g match, however, I've also seen performance benefits from RCSI. Yes, management of the versions has overhead. No denying it. However,...

Yep. That's the problem. There's no simple way to federate this kind of querying across multiple servers.

However, with loads and loads of effort, you could. So that's an option, albeit...

Thanks for the kind words.

Don't get me wrong, temp tables as a way to break up or break down data prior to other processing is a valid approach. However, it...

Let's assume that the databases & queries are tuned (that's always a question for me though, tuning is an ongoing process, not a one & done proposition). For example, since...

Connection console? I'm not sure what that is. However, let's talk through using the tools to connect to a server.

When you open SQL Server Management Studio, you should see this:

One aspect of remote queries you can't affect is the data being moved between the two systems. If you move one million rows (just plucking a number out of the...

It's really hard to tune a query that returns everything. In fact, you can't. All you can do is throw hardware at the problem. Buy more and faster CPUs, memory,...

No need to drop the table. It'll get cleaned up by internal processes once that procedure completes.

Now, we could talk about using a cursor to insert rows into a table....

Sounds like either bad parameter sniffing or out of date statistics or a combination of the two.

The way that the query optimizer works is it uses the statistics to come up with row counts (estimated or actual). Based on those counts, it makes decisions on how...

I'm going to be as honest as possible. I don't remember how 2005 works any more.

However, yes, you absolutely can upgrade SQL Server to 64bit on 2005. Doing so changes...