Are all the tables indexed on the columns being referenced in the join? For example, is there an index on shipment.shipment?

Have you looked at the query plan to see what...

round()?

declare @i numeric( 6, 4)

select @i = 1.6025

select @i, round(@i, 2)

That's what I thought and no offense. The questions seem a little silly to me sometimes because I have worked with them for so long and you are questioning things...

I like "slightly denormalized" data for reporting, if it's a secondary data store and not a primary one.

I agree with David that this can become cumbersome, not only for deletes,...

Interesting thread. Space in the log or data file could be an issue. While SQL Server autogrows, all activity in the db stops, which can appear as "freezing up". this...

I haven't ever thought about distribution, but I have removed it from model. I don't want any guest permissions on servers, only those that I explicitly have setup.

If it breaks...

I saw a presentation about 4 years ago from a guy on hardware tuning. He talked about a few interesting things with disks. First was that you start to really...

Maybe no more disks around

You probably need to run a backup transaction xxx with no_log to free up space. You would also want to setup a regular log backup or move to simple mode.

The server decides this and the DBA has no control over this.

You'll need to reduce the size of the result set, or remove some things like ordering. What kind of 50M result set can you actually work with? If this is...

I think you need to enable remote connections as a server setting. Try sp_configure or the properties for the server.

And the key should be periodically changed. Wouldn't want someone to "crack" last year's backup and then be able to use the key to get current card numbers.

With that, be...

Anytime and definitely a varchar. Perf should be fine.

Haven't changed anything. Is it IE 6?