[dba-SQLServer] Installing SBS2003 - was What is going on

Well thank you to all who nagged me incessantly to move this machine to a
true server.  You all know who you are.

I can tell you that several things have happened.  

Under XP, the load on the two cores of the dual core processor "followed"
each other fairly closely in Task Manager, Performance tab.  Not identical,
but close.  Under 2003, they are very independent graphs, one instance of
SQL Server EM running a shrink operation is utilizing core 1 but core two
remains pretty much unused.  Opening another instance of EM happens pretty
quickly, burrowing down to the database happens pretty quickly.  Opening a
smaller (3 million) table containing just one file from the big table
happens at a "normal" speed and pegs Core 2 as it is opening.  Paging down
through the data causes core 2 to work, but does not affect core 1.  

Just as predicted by you know who you are.

Whether the actual shrink operation gets any faster remains to be seen, but
at least the database itself remains usable in some sense, which is really
fascinating given that one core is in the process of trying to shrink the
database file while the other core is trying to (and succeeding) find data
in that same database file.  

So I can't yet say necessarily that any given operation is faster, but at
least SQL Server is not locked up tight as it was under XP.  In fact it
appears that XP's implementation of or usage of dual cores is not as good as
it might be given the behavior of the two cores in Task Manager.

Thanks again to all the nags.

John W. Colby
Colby Consulting
www.ColbyConsulting.com