Excel automatically adjusts data types and precision to handle different values unless you set the number of decimals. SQL Server doesn't act like that. You'll get implicit conversions that might...

It was a great session with Paul and the art of negotiating is something that everyone could do better with. It is definitely important, not just for tools, but also...

Check that the services are running, check that your firewall is not preventing connections.

You should spend some time learning about SQL Server and it's structure. Look in Books Online for logical and physical architectures.

There should always be free space in the database as...

Management Studio. Unless the SQL Server instance is on your local workstation, you are always managing permissions remotely.

I'd start with Books Online and get the basics from there. They have a good overview.

We have a lot of articles here: http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Articles/clustering, and there are some good videos here...

Do you mean that if there is a quantity of 3 for the it items, you need to insert 3 rows into order details? Are these the same rows? What...

The first few queries after a reboot should have a lower ratio.

I haven't seen anything reported on this before. Do you know what the ratio was before, 91%? 95%?

some interesting replies here here. Sorry I wasn't in the discussion earlier as I was coming home from the UK.

The CLR has definitely made SQL Server a more complete platform....

I think you're on the right track here. I've never used linked servers much in environments so I'm not sure if this makes the best sense for consolidation. Things I've...

If the transaction log gets really big, it's because of activity. Changes in the database. No bugs or other things cause this to grow.

Perhaps you're rebuilding indexes? That will grow...

Has anything else changed? Is this right after a reboot or has it been continuing for some time since you installed the SP?

Different services perhaps. Those users are for full text search and sql agent. I think the default service user is different as well and you might not have noticed it.

All software does get procedural, though parallelism might get through some of that, and the interrupt/jumps to new parts as we wait for IO can also help things appear to...

I probably have a few good ones, maybe more in articles than answers, but I'd like to think that most of us have good answers, often backing each other up.

I...