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...

I have altered the question to say "easiest way" and I tend to agree with Hugo that a real table would have other constraints on it. However making a copy...

Monitoring is looking for something wrong to happen, auditing is determining what happened, and then where you can fix it.

I hope that the person I wrote about is the minority...

No real advantage.

You really should consider indexing the heaps. A clustered index is how SQL Server is optimized to work, so create one on each table. Is there a reason not to...

What is the maximum memory setting? You might increase that, and then look at the ETL queries and see if they can be indexed better. Check the missing index DMV,...

Do you mean that you want the same number of rows in A as in B for each ID?

An outer join will help you figure out which rows are not...

Please post in the correct forum. Moved to SSIS.

The 1252 should be the length of data selected.

You need to look through your data. It's possible that you have some rows...

You need some way to determine what's changed.

I might actually write triggers on the first copy that moves inserts and updates to a second database. Then the deletes won't affect...