I'll add my endorsement of the Reacher novels. Great stuff. I'v ealso been reading anything by James Rollins, the Agent Prendergast novels by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Childs. Right now,...

This is why all companies whould have policies on the management and protection of information that spells out the different classes of data (company use, private, etc) and what steps...

Try running some of the inquery analyzer so there's no impact from the application.

Personally, given how cheap memory is, I wouldn't try to run a server with less than 2GB...

In our environment, we have folks called DBA's whose main role is to check out a privileged ID from an automated ID control system, run the scripts they are given,...

And, if you work for a company whose stock trades on a US stock exchange, you better have comprehensive change management policies in place or the SOX police will be...

Why not query the information_schema views to get the data you are looking for? All of the contents of SP's, views, etc are exposed in those views.

As far as I know, we don't have a Business Objects Server, but we do have .net available, which I had not thought of using, as deploying executables is problematic...

We;ve managed to kill the use of Access as a development tool by simply refusing to support applications developed by users or their proxies (hiring programmers outside the normal channels)....

A couple of points here. USB ports can be inactivated by application of a group policy when the computer is booting. It creates pain for many users, but can be...

"Loosing your server role rights, such as sysadmin, after activating an activation role seems like a non-issue. "

This is absolutely true. I can't think of a reason why anyone should be...

Our DBA's have admin rights, but not on their primary logins that are used for general LAN access, email etc. All admin ID's are restricted to use on servers. This...

I'll second the point that access to change data on a production database should be severely restricted. Our DBA's can only change data if they login with a special ID...

We don't allow access to SQL Server by specific user id's, only thorugh group membership. We also do not use SQL logins unless required by an application. If you use...

Save the trace as a SQL script and look for the INSERT statements in the resuling .sql file.

Here's some of the things we do to ensure SOX compliance:

Have an owner for each application who is responsible for approving any changes to the application.

Each database should have an...