I assume SQL Server 2012. No such thing as SQL 12 yet.

This is much easier to do in SSIS. Is there a reason you don't do that?

As far as what...

I wouldn't necessarily trust sp_spaceused, especially in a short period of time.

If you are deleting rows, the size is going down. Garbage collection, and perhaps lots of free space...

That covers most everything.

For admin, I'd say this one: http://www.amazon.com/Professional-Microsoft-Server-Administration-Programmer/dp/0470247967/ref=sr_1_30?ie=UTF8&qid=1337967674&sr=8-30

Dev: http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-SQL-Server-2008-Developers/dp/1590599586/ref=sr_1_16?ie=UTF8&qid=1337967619&sr=8-16

mlbakerak (5/25/2012)

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How about taking time to remember the men and women who have sacrificed their lives for the country we live in and the freedoms we enjoy? I think...

herladygeekedness (5/25/2012)

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I'm with you. Blame is absolutely a negative word.

"Who is responsible" is nicer but still smacks of my mother being mad about something and demanding to know "who...

Glad you had a good time and made it back. Everything OK, I assume.

I would lean towards alerts here, as opc.three suggested.

Good answers above for the HA stuff.

For the core databases: how often does the data change? Would replication work well? You could replicate data from the 7 to the 93...

IIRC, the decision to log something is from the RaiseError command, not the error. If the WITH LOG parameter is used, it's logged. If the severity is high enough, this...

You should convert these to the same data type to join them. Ideally they would be, and you will lose some indexing benefits if they are not.

You could use...

You must have had something that made it grow large. Some transaction that created a lot of logging in tempdb. It's possible that you need that much log for your...

Sean is correct. There is no way to know what might make sense.

As a general rule, you might build indexes with multiple columns. I might, depending on the data, build...

Shouldn't be anything for the end user. They shouldn't know, or care. Services should just work.

The cloud, hosted services/servers/platforms, is just...

Joe Clifford (5/23/2012)

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Zynga.com has probably the most interesting/compelling story "out there" about their use of the cloud - they started as a 100% cloud play and then discovered that they...

Steve Cullen (5/24/2012)

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Just my opinion, but I think bcp would be simpler for this. The fixed width format file can be generated quickly from a staging table and a...