+1 for what Grant said.

licenses are administrative. No checking here, so just install on a new machine, use the license, and decommission the old one so that you don't get caught in a...

Some of the downloads don't even let you enter a product key, but as Grant mentioned, it's for development.

Express, Standard, Enterprise for production.

I tend to agree with Gianluca. Some companies do value the certifications (or need them for Partner status), but many use them as a checkbox.

However, the effort to get certified...

Unless you have some field in a table that has a date stamp of some sort, you can't go back and look at sizes directly. If you have old backups,...

+1 to cunningham.

Also, what's a performance problem? Is it slower than it was before? By what metric? Or is it just that users are complaining?

You can run the Database Tuning Advisor, but be careful with the recommendations. Go slow and add one index at a time. This will give you some ideas of what's...

Search for dynamic PIVOT or crosstab on the site here. Jeff Moden has a good piece that might help you here.

I suspect the installation failed. Might try repairing the install from setup.

Koen Verbeeck (4/28/2015)

---

Steve Jones - SSC Editor (4/28/2015)

---

Had a funny one today. On the DLM webinar I did with Grant, we had a guy ask how to recover a master...

Server or database level?

here are a few items:

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/Security/62064/

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/Security/66129/

Had a funny one today. On the DLM webinar I did with Grant, we had a guy ask how to recover a master database and another one show an error...

rustman (4/28/2015)

---

It is amazing to me how people's career paths can be so different at times and then others are similar...I too started my IT career as a Novell Administrator...

Ralph Hightower (4/28/2015)

---

In the "Understand the True Source of Problems" article:

2 – NOLOCK is required on every query. It makes things run faster.

Instead READ_UNCOMMITTED is suggested.

At one place I worked...

Gary Varga (4/28/2015)

---

I am certain that as an industry that we reduce our productivity over the longer term due to ignoring root cause analysis or, sometimes more frustrating, ignoring the...