[drsim]

I don't know which version the parent looked at, but we had a mix of SQL Server 6.5 and 2000 servers. Those on 6.5 suffered from all kinds of phantom errors which a regular restart schedule fixed. SQL Server 2000 on the other hand was solid.

[mgkimsal]

similar experience - worked with 6, 6.5 and 7 on NT 3.5 and NT 4. 4 was better, but it often was 4 itself which ended up needing rebooting, vs SQL Server itself, but... when one's on the other, does it make much of a difference? There wasn't an option to run MSSQL 7 on anything else, IIRC.

I do remember 7 on 4 was much improved re: requiring reboots, and the projects I was on ended up doing it periodically more out of proactive concern re: NT4 than real demonstrated problems with MSSQL 7. 1999 project had 80 NT servers running IIS reboot on a schedule every few hours with a big load balancer in front. 70+ up at any one time, always a handful being reboot and coming in and out of the pool. If we didn't proactively do it, they'd just go down anyway. IIRC that spoke more to IIS than NT but again... how can you necessarily tell the difference? Not rhetorical, there were probably good ways to dig in and try to determine root causes (and I think some folks tried or did) but it didn't mean we could actually do anything about it (like patch and recompile the NT kernel).