I believe that the deletion is done last in 'sqlmaint'. So if you say to keep 2 days online, you start with 2 backups then create the third and then...

Now the 'meat and potatoes' ... Production DBA ...

You have:

- cell phone (personal)

- blackberry for email (and another cell phone builtin for work)

- pager possibly (backup system in case...

Some food for thought ... I took a DB2 DBA course way back in 1987 (I've been SQL Server DBA since v4.21) and the instructor wrote 4 things on the erasable...

Has the application gone through recent maintenance ? Do users have ADHOC query/update capability ? Were there recent schema changes (triggers added for example) ? New tables and indexes added...

Does the owner of the JOBs created by the Maintenance plan have the same authority to log on to both servers ?

We have run into this issue with other applications after Veritas backups (not once on SQL Server). Occasionally Veritas does not 'clean up' after itself leaving 'file handles' on files...

In AD you have the ability to 'limit' the servers that a domain user account can log into (i.e only server_a & server_b or all servers except server_c). The default is...

Check out BOL under SET, there are a few more options you might want to SET 'ON'. 'STATISTICS IO' & 'STATISTICS TIME' might start to shed the light that you...

This sounds like a marketing discussion. The bottom line is that the product(s) deliver the intended business functionality that the market and users need. The could call it "SQL 1984"...

Based on reading other threads/discussions/websites it seems the only reason to use 'affinity' on a SQL server that is dedicated to 'only' SQL Server would be in the event that you...

Yup, 2 1/2 years at an internet stock trading company about number of  years ago ... some examples:

1) Release candidate of Win 2K Enterprise server put into production on the external...

If I remember correctly "<>" is equivalent to "NOT =" in some queries and anytime you use "NOT" the optimizer tosses out many useful (efficient) query plans auto-magically. This "NOT" behaviour...

Try looking at the COALESCE funtion, it's been around for a while (I think since v4.21) since your in v6.5 compatibility mode.

Do not forget to stop and restart the SQL Server services as a last step.

Give it time ... Good programing principals never die, (initialization/process/wrap-up still apples) they just undergo 'paradigm and terminology' shifts ...