My opinion, anything labeled "redistributable" is safe to leave as is.

What I would look for is "what was installed at the same time as SQL Server?".  In your screenshots, you...

I would load up extended events or profiler to see what is happening on the database side.  What queries are being sent during the time the application is connecting to...

Can you provide some DDL and a script we can run to reproduce your original results?

If not, one approach would be to do a self join on firstname, lastname, and...

That is a new one for me.  If it is the exact same script, I would expect it to have the exact same results each time.

Any chance anything else has...

My guess (could be way out to lunch) is that your scripts are slightly different for the restore.  What I mean is if you drop the database and recreate it,...

It is because of your aggregate function (SUM).  Once you put in an aggregate function, you NEED to group by all non-aggregate columns that are in use.  Otherwise SQL has...

Another thought is it could be parameter sniffing problem too.  If user A passes in 'hello' as a parameter and user B passes in 'world', it could be that the...

That is a good point Grant and Fredrico.  Optimizing a 2 ms query that is run once per year is wasted effort.  Optimizing it when it is run 100's of...

As ratbak noted - Cursors are slow.  Cursors work on a row by row basis rather than on the set of data.  The more rows you have, the slower the...

I am just thinking if you have Python in SQL Server (can't remember if 2012 had that or not, but thinking it MAY have been a newer version that first...

To add to what Grant said, is there a reason you NEED that to be dynamic SQL?  Quick look through it I don't see any reason for that to be...

Maybe I'm a bit unfamiliar with that level of XML, but to me that looks like it is XML that is expected to be read by a specific tool (svg?).

From...

Pretty sure you are going to be looking at parsing the XML to get the signature.  You can do this with TSQL (which is where i would start).  Once you...

I am sure there are a lot of ways, but my approach is to check each individually.

Perfmon will tell you quite nicely how much CPU  SQL Server is using compared...

I think this falls under an "it depends" scenario.  If the users are logging in with a generic account and that is all the information that SQL Server has, then...