We released a version of our software to a client the other week.  As they were testing a page that brought up some information, they found that worked fine when they started testing, but by the end, it just stopped working.  It was returning a Timeout expired error.

Now we had stress tested this application like crazy and we were certain that it would be able to handle the load of users they would have.  We knew this worked so we checked previous version and sure enough, they worked just fine.

I searched out the answer to see if there were any problems using a SqlDataAdapter (actually using LLBLGen, but the source shows it using a SqlDataAdapter). I found nothing.

I then sought the help of a DBA who recommended I run this:

sp_updatestats

After this ran for a couple of minutes, I tried to view the page again, and it came up with no pauses, errors or timeouts!

So please, remember to love your database.  If you neglect it, it will crap on you.