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.

I agree with Ian. SQL follows the OS clocks, and if they're not updating, that's an issue. If you have machines in other time zones, use a standard clock, like...

I did miss the "not at all", which is bad. You definitely need to test systems, though honestly I'm more concerned about the Windows or application level than the SQL...

Ranges. Determine some range for each server and let it grant IDs within that range.

Or set up a central number distributor. Service Broker would be great, but any distributed query...

AFAIK, this cannot happen with SQL logins. Are you sure they're not using Windows auth?

I'd agree as well, but really caution you to be sure your disks are your disks. I've had other vendors really try to build a couple large arrays and then...