I didn't think we had orphaned transactions in SQL. You can use dbcc opentran to find open transactions, but I thought that if the client dropped the server would rollback.

Looks like one of the tasks if failing. Can you provide details on this task? Are you sure it's configured correctly?

Great list from Antares above and while I agree life is easier for the Windows team, it still needs to work for you and your clients. The hardware resource issues...

You could report it to MS. AFAIK, this should never happen. My suspicion is the data got put there, possibly without your knowledge. The backup stream processes pages from only...

I do think Microsoft has done a great job and I think their pricing is actually fairly low. Doesn't seem that way for a monopoly in places, but I remember...

OK, the answers have been corrected to 4 100GB drives in a RAID 5 array. Apparently I cannot add

Points awarded back for those...

Thanks for the comments and I was surprised I couldn't find a good summary elsewhere.

Some of the missing things mentioned are good ones and I've tended to group them...

I'm not sure why you need VMWare. SQL allows multiple instances on one machine, something that most software does not allow. It also is worth mentioning that not every application...

It was my understanding that a heap is a table without a clustered index.

Clustered or non-clustered index is not related necessarily to a PK. A PK is something different. It...

A SELECT statement might qualify for the E part (extraction), but I agree with Gift Peddie that T-SQL doesn't really do the job.

T-SQL and Excel can work in places,...

What are you looking to learn? Or for what purpose?

The comma is causing issues for sure. You can prefix a field in Excel with a quote (') to have it translated as text.

As mentioned above, I'm still not seeing...

I'm not sure why not either. It's a good product space and it would definitely help with this issue.

Perhaps a cross join with a table of names, random SSNs,...

I tend to agree with Ian. While virtualization makes sense in some cases and gives you hardware independence (a problem with Windows), SQL is mostly hardware independent already. Multiple instances...

You can make it autoincrement by setting the identity column.

If you don't want to do that, you have to calculate the next ID value and insert it into the table.