William - to address both replies (Jeffery and sterling3721, correct me if I am misrepresenting):

1 - the new driver MAY have some optimizations in it that cause it to give...

My guess - your queries don't need to use all of the cores OR your SQL isn't configured to use all of the cores when going parallel... which is best...

I imagine you could build up a DLL that could handle it and do some magic on the SQL side, but it is not going to be a quick operation.

Alternately,...

I am not 100% sure, but I am about 95% sure that that is not possible and would be a HUGE performance hit to go that route anyways.  A better...

Locks are a required part of SQL Server.  You wouldn't want 2 queries updating a single piece of data at the exact same time.  Much better for them to run...

Just to confirm - you are NOT reindexing anything during that job step, right?

I just found this post:

https://www.sqlservercentral.com/forums/topic/sql-job-fails-giving-message-2528

which says that message 2528:

"The message 2528 is what DBCC Reindex always outputs"

When you say it is not returning a number, what is it returning?

Also, in your code, you are declaring @newID as a VARCHAR and then setting it to the result...

My only guess about it is readability and habit from other languages.

What I mean is some coding languages take a new line as being the end of that statement so...

A nice easy one for a Monday morning!  BUT a very important one to know about when working with AG's.

My method of experimenting is to get a database that has some sample data I can play with and just go at it.

We had a long blocking query a few...

My first step - check the logs.  Not JUST for the error you reported here, but the lines before and after that.  I suspect that there is a bunch of...

If you have a short list of languages and don't mind a bunch of SUM and CASE statements, you could get by using those

Such as:

DECLARE @tmpTbl TABLE
(
[USERname]...

Since this sounds like interview or homework (as others indicated), I think you are likely not to get 100% help.  You are asking a lot and giving very little.

Starting with...

Looking at that chunk of powershell, I don't see where it is looking for the name "Sheet1".  BUT if you did want to check for that, I would possibly have...

If you want to throw the query into a variable, you need to double up all of your quotes.  So all ' characters become ''.  All '' become ''''.  and...