SQLWebpedia

Grant has done a great job on the basics that you can use to understand even complicated query plans: http://www.simple-talk.com/sql/performance/graphical-execution-plans-for-simple-sql-queries/

Microsoft and Solid Quality Mentors have produced a free Technical Reference Guide on SQL 2008 upgrade best practices.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=66d3e6f5-6902-4fdd-af75-9975aea5bea7&displaylang=en

For the ultimate guide to upgrading to SQL Server 2008, check out the whitepaper published by Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Upgrade Technical Reference Guide.

The PSS Team blog (Bob Dorr wrote article) has a great discussion on a couple of common myths for SQL Server performance:

• SQL Server Uses One Thread Per Data File
• A Disk Queue Length greater than 2 indicates an I/O bottleneck

 http://blogs.msdn.com/psssql/archive/2007/02/21/sql-server-urban-legends-discussed.aspx
Summary notes from article:

Grant wrote an excellent introductory article on execution plan basics and has a more detailed ebook for sale on lulu.com. http://www.simple-talk.com/sql/performance/execution-plan-basics. Code listing link.

Your NIC card configuration settings maybe the cause of slow file copies over your wide area network (WAN). Also, know that Windows Explorer file copy is designed to throttle its network usage, so use Robocopy, Richcopy, FTP, etc instead.

Trying to install any post SP2 hotfix, I kept getting this error message in the Summary.log file (C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Setup Bootstrap\LOG\Hotfix)

MSP Error: 29537 Cannot promote the transaction to a distributed transaction because there is an active save point in this transaction

Microsoft has provided 2 links for SQL Express Edition -:
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Edition with Advanced Services Service Pack 2
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=5b5528b9-13e1-4db9-a3fc-82116d598c3d&displaylang=en
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Edition with Advanced Services

The development team was updating a native xml column in batches of 200 or so and attempted to speed things up by increasing the batch size. Once they hit about 500 they broke the log reader agent and we saw these errors:

I had the bright idea to upgrade SQL 2000 to 2005 by detaching and uninstalling SQL 2000 and resintalling SQL 2005 to get a "clean install". The database had both a publication and a subscription (transactional replications). This was a couple of hour mistake. But was fixed easily enough with one post I found in newsgroups.

I tried to run this command: