According only to personal experience, I've found that the usual thing is to...

It's difficult to help you without any table DDL and sample data.  However, if you don't want the debit and credit amounts to appear separately in your result set,...

Hi Guys, thank you all for your reply. another manufacturer is no alternative according to the department. However, I also want to prevent the db from doing mysterious things....

IMHO, the auditors are incorrect here and need to be trained that your controls are much more finite than their broad recommendation.

What does the software do?

The  future date is the date the article is supposed to be released.

I hate posting on SO because people can edit your stuff and the moderators can be idiots but I thought I'd take a chance and post a performance test along...

That's on the edge of not being enough for a 750GB database although it'll...

I think I have a plan, does this seem like the correct method to use. Start datafile1 500 datafile2 500 Add datafile 3 of 250 GIG and set filegrowth...

Totally agree with Steve.  I'll also add that if you have 450GB, the code is probably doing something wrong like an accidental many-to-many join.

The advice to not shrink it is...

Same here except backwards for us. ...

While it does depend, in general I'd think that while the DBA might be not responsible for those design items, they likely will be held accountable for them.  ...

This is good information you are all providing. When you get to high TB of data, then it does take a little more planning and structure. Our logs show...

That's what I'm getting at... to me, it's always been private. 😉

Assuming that the date occurred in the past...

If that number is supposed to represent '2005-06-06', then the conversion formula is ...

 SELECT DATEADD(dd,12940,'1970');

If it's supposed to represent...