You can find a lot of those tools to try out by doing a search on: data lineage tools sql server

Sue

Just to add...if you do use autogrowth, don't use a percentage. It can end up biting you. Use a fixed growth size that's reasonable for your storage system.

Sue

Maybe try sp_clean_db_file_free_space on the file and see if that helps.

Sue

Just to clarify - I didn't mean to point to anyone's blog in particular - KendraLittle and ScaryDBA are a couple of the best SQL server blogs out there. They...

The push to use extended events on SQL Server 2008 is what turned me away from being all in on them. And I had even downloaded and used the snap-in...

Compression. Columnstore indexes can use columnstore or columnstore archival compression which significantly reduces the space used.

Sue

EBS volumes can be encrypted and TDE is also supported - check the security optimization section in this whitepaper:

Best Practices for Deploying Microsoft SQL Server on AWS

Sue

In reference to your first question, you can pipe the output and use select (select-object) to select the columns. If you were just doing the backup with something like $Results...

Having disk issues isn't going to make it easy for you to address so you likely want to correct that. Have you checked the extended events session for AlwaysOn health?...

Fix the issues with the disks - it sounds like it's more hardware related so check the windows event logs and fix whatever the issue is with the disks, controller.

Sue

A connection and a session aren't the same thing. Often you have one session on each connection but there are exceptions. For example, you can have multiple sessions on a...

Large can mean 50 GB to some, 50 TB to others. How long is a piece of string? You need to test some of this in a lower environment. We...

It sounds like you have two different issues. The first one with blocking, killing a process - you don't need activity monitor to kill a process. I don't use activity...

Did you check to see if the process is blocked by anything or if there are any waits when this runs forever?

Sue

You can read the info in the dump files with windbg. You can find more info and download links at:

Download Debugging Tools for Windows

and then do a search on:...