thanks for the book ref. Grabbed a sample for the Kindle 😛

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/Index+Management/

Scripts for index management.

Be sure you have transaction log backups running.

The target server error is because you are working with master target servers. I'd disable this as it was flaky...

GO ends the stored procedure and batch. Use a return so you know where the proc ends.

CREATE procedure UpdateData AS

update tblTest

SET Field01='Value01', Field02='Value02', Field03='Value03'

WHERE (Field04 =...

I'm not sure any particular industry will be better for SQL jobs. A lot of the stimulus package now seems to be trying to save some things, local government, banks,...

I agree with Grant. If it's still working, and you can let it run, do so. If you need to get it finished, and perhaps just restart it, try killing...

The old rules of leaving 1.5-2.5GB for the US definitely applied to 32 bit because that much space was needed for paging out PAE. With 64, I'm not sure what...

Why a local admin? Most services don't need this.

you want to follow the same advice for service accounts as user accounts. Used the least privileges needed. For SSIS, I'd use...

I assume you have the ID columns indexed on both tables. A "not exists" subquery might help, but as Grant said, you'd need to post more details and do some...

I tend to used CPU, users, and batches as my benchmarks. Run this across a few weeks, get samples on all days, exlude backup/maintenance times.

Watch out for peaks. A...

I like Jonathan's advice. The other things I'd recommend are:

- Don't get certified now. Do that when you have a little experience working with the product, even in side projects.

-...

Phil has a great point. We do need trust, and I'm not sure what the answer is. I know years ago I worked with a company that imported from China,...

It's not that they add extra constraints, it's often authors are thinking of one thing. One small area they are trying to show and they don't have the same frame...

Clustering addresses specific requirements. It works well for some people, and one of the reasons it works well is the restrictions on hardware and setup.

It mirrors an instance. Database Mirroring...

PIVOT is a unique solution. Thanks for that.

However, is there a reason this shouldn't be done on a client? Would seem that as this scales, you're using server resources for...

Scale Out is hard, and it's mostly architectural.

You want to spend a few minutes on it early, thinking about where you could separate out pieces of data to another server...