What prompted you to change the isolation level to repeatable read? Do you usually run the query in serializable?

You should just be able to parse the instance name from the server name ... it will be anything after the backslash (if it exists) and before the colon. ...

Check the SQL logs and see if your failures are there. If so, there will be an error code that will let you know why the login is failing.

There are plenty of tutorials for Powershell out there, just google it.

Also you can download versions for XP Pro and Win 2003, which is nice if you want to think...

If you get the MCP newsletter, there is information in there incuding a few links. This is basically the ranger program opened up to anyone with the skills/time/money. ...

First you should grant the appropriate rights to any of the Windows administrators that need access to SQL (for application purposes or otherwise) ... that will enable you to drop...

I think you need to also query some other dmvs - sys.dm_os_tasks, sys.dm_os_workers, sys.dm_os_threads etc., depending on what level of detail you are looking to obtain. Tasks is a...

If you start the server with the /f parameter, it creates a tempdb with a 1MB primary file ... you can then adjust it to the initial size that you...

Rather than a question of decimal vs float, it's a question of scale and precision .... just ensure that the datatype you choose is sufficient for your purposes. I...

The mirror is always unreadable, but if you use Enterprise Edition you can create a snapshot of it and read from that.

It depends on what you need in the way of redundancy ... if you don't need to use RAID then you have several options, if you do then 5 drives...

You may also want to consider mirroring and a snapshot, if you are using Enterprise Edition.

You aren't telling us something. Before the indexes were added, it performed a table scan (which is to be expected, it has to read every row to know if...

Have you pre-sized the database files? If each hit is doing an insert (to an audit table say) and the db files are full, they will have to autogrow...

If you are using the Enterprise edition of SQL2005, you can do online rebuilds with

ALTER INDEX [index] ON REBUILD WITH (ONLINE = ON)

There is no danger of corruption...