Also, if you want more tempdb space, move it first, restart, then alter it for more space. Don't do both at once.

It's simple, as Jonathan mentioned, but for sure there is downtime.

Not a lot, but enough to stop/restart SQL Server.

Never seen that. Can you reboot to see if it clears? I know that's not a good way to handle this, but I'm curious to see if it goes away...

Someone likely has a schema lock on it somewhere. Check sp_lock

Diverse skills if there is talent can get a higher salary. Jacks of all trades, masters of none is what so many average people have, and that's normal. That's not...

Is this an interview question? hopefully you've answered "I don't know"

It's easy to do with SSMS as a hint.

I'm with Raj. Unless you are deploying changes daily, I'd say that real-time is a bad idea. Even using QA for standby doesn't work since you can't "trust" the data...

There is some overhead to measuring the counters and logging them. If you have the graphical display up, this uses overhead as well.

you can use Task Manager to get an...

A particular SPID typically is on one connection. A user can be connected many times, but each process has it's own ID.

SPIDs are reused, so you can see them in...

Can you explain what you mean? Do you mean statistical standard deviations? there are functions for this.

Set up logging for the package, and then use the logging provider to point to a table.

Moved to the SSIS forum.

You want to keep free space in the files. That is what is used as the server needs to allocate space for inserts/deletes. This is expensive, and you don't want...

What are you looking to monitor? There's a whole range of things here.

sqlSentry has a good performance monitoring tool.

Quest has some tools, can be expensive

Idera has a variety of tools...

I like Diff backups if you can do them because they speed and simplify restores. I have run them every 2-6 hours at times to ensure that I don't have...

I agree with Robert. Portability doesn't mean writing the lowest common denominator. The code shouldn't be lifted from one platform and dropped on another. It should be slightly altered to...