I thought 431 was hard because it covered a wide variety of topics. For me the questions in some areas took some guessing, since I wasn't sure. The sims were...

There's a SQL 2000 DTS Runtime you can install on 2005 to run your packages.

The advice above looks pretty good to me as well.

It's deleting the parent record and having the child records deleted too. No perf penalty I'm aware of, but it's automatic, which means that it happens and you can lose...

SQL 7 and 2000 had some great benchmarks on SAP. They used to be some of the biggest MS testing customers.

Daniel

For your DB, I think you want to look at...

You need these to be sure you don't have mislinked or cross linked page or corruption. If you catch them early, you shouldn't lose data. They don't happen much, but...

Does the Update Stats job fail ever?

I agree that something strange is happening. How are you transferring the dbs?

This is a separate server, right? Any restarts on it during the...

Viraj,

It was a good question, so I started to list some differences. Look for an article soon on this topic.

Steve

Data backups and log backups are differnet. IF you are in full or bulk logged recovery mode, you need to be sure you back up the log as well as...

I believe you can use images, though I've never tried.

The only way you can insert two tables with bulk insert or bcp is to already build the IDs in both...

Keep in mind when you run it manually from your workstation, it runs from your workstation under the context of your account. As a job it runs under the SQL...

They might not be planning on Windows for the OCPL, but they did alter the specs slightly to meet the Windows min. I think it's good that there's an option...

Ah, it wasn't to trick you, but educate you that these are restart-restart counters. I think you could argue that they are set to zero, or nothing. It's just...

Both QA and app use cache, but the way the cache gets used is that exactly the same command needs to run, down to the whitespace. This means that it's...

Interesting notes from Kimball. I'm only 100 pages or so into his book, but looking forward to the rest of it.

Couple things: First do the processes run fine normally and then occassionally timeout?

Check that your connections or the server isn't set to have things timeout. By default queries run to...