Nice article. I had been in production DBA role for long, I understand the thrill of the chasing a performance issue and feeling exited finding the real culprit. Most often...

You can you the old master.dbo.sysprocesses or the newer dmv

sys.dm_exec_sessions

It is strange when its not working for one particular date alone.

The derived column expression looks fine to me.

What is your source connection and what format you are reading...

in ssis 2005 you need to use SUBSTRING(ColumnName,1,3)

That is ia funny way to create your table.

I think you need to try the unpivot function.

If I understand your requirement correctly, you want to move files to a new drive and rename the drive itself.

Assuming the following,

You cleanly shut down all instances, move the files...

Koen is right. What you need to do is return something like all null row and

handle this in SSRS (displaying a label on condition)

As I mentioned since both databses are in same instance, the buffer pool is shared, there wont be impact in join performance.

But normally we split databases for security or functional...

Technically if it is on the same instance, it should not create a problem.

But is it only because of the size you are going for a new database? In that...

I have used the following trick in such situations

Select '['+name+'],' from syscolumns where id=object_id('tableName')

and name not in ('a','b')

You can use the result in the seleect clause

you can use fileinfo in C#

Please see the below link.

http://www.dotnetperls.com/fileinfo

please review the acces for the account running package. I have seen these kind of issues when running through proxies

Great introduction, Eagerly waiting for the articles. Most of the issues mentioned in this article I have faced already in development. Waiting to see whether BIML can be of help....

This may be due to some patch made on one of the servers.

Can you test with openquery to see there is no permission, configuration issues

Select * from openquery(linkservername,'select top 1...

Many scripts available already in script section

see link below for eg

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/Indexing/94375/