Other things have been covered but be sure to have tempdb on its own disk so it doesn't fight for IO versus other databases.

There aren't any definitive answer foreveryone but...

If you are sure it won't truncate any data then I would create a new table with the nvarchar column. Copy all the data from old table to new...

Also try to prevent DML from happening on the table while building the clustered index.

Nothing slows down index creation more than inserts, updates and deletes.

I would suggest carve out your partition and do some IO test.

Data would require combination of write and read geared more towards reads depending on your database.

Log would require testing...

Obviously the bulk insert would be faster without the clustered index unless the order of the insert follows the order of the clustered index. It all depends on the...

Also remember that even bulk operations are not minimally logged if the table has a clustered index and is not empty.

So changing recovery model will not change much in this...

This is straigtforward and using the four part name to access the Linked server data shouldn't cause any problem.

Not sure how using openquery is going to solve anything if the...

You have to first determine what permissions are currently granted to the developers.

Are all the developer logins in any roles?

You can explicitly deny permissions on objects which should override any...

He mentioned that he sometimes has to do restores to get data from one of those 200 tables.

You cannot restore a specific filegroup without first restoring the primary file group.

I...

Proportional fill has to do with current free disk space remaining on each file. So if file1 is 10 GB in size but only 1 GB of free space...

There is no other alternative I am afraid.

Either you need the permission on the remote server or you just have to deal with performance hit with executing the query against...

Did you try the Execute...At command?

EXEC sp_addlinkedserver 'SeattleSales', 'SQL Server'

GO

EXECUTE ( 'CREATE TABLE AdventureWorks2008R2.dbo.SalesTbl

(SalesID int, SalesName varchar(10)) ; ' ) AT SeattleSales;

GO

It's much easier to add space than to shrink a data file.

Only thing I can recommend is move all your objects into the second filegroup and then shrink the empty...

SQL 2005 BOL doesn't specify but this is from SQL 2000 so I believe is has not changed.

Filegroups use a proportional fill strategy across all the files within

each filegroup. As...

Try running SQLIO to test out there isn't a bottleneck in your DAS system.

If everything appears fine you can check off one part of the checklist.

But that is...