Thanks for the summary of everything you did! It's definitely good to have a working solution, even if there is still an unsolved mystery in there.

I've run into many...

I can take this one. May take a bit of time to do the due diligence in coming up with a list of the best of the new DMVs...

This TSQL will delete all duplicates except for...

GoofyGuy (4/29/2014)

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Ed Pollack wrote:

... if your product has an uptime requirement of 99.95, then Azure is immediately out-of-the-question as it promises only 99.9%.

The difference in uptime, over the course of...

It's pretty straightforward to move data into the cloud when it's your own data---but for the many companies (such as where I work) out there that offer SASS solutions, the...

TheComedian: As always, backing up data in any production environment before making a big change is critical! I left it out as this is a demo, but it's certainly...

That sheds a ton of light on the odd behavior!

It sounds like if you want plan reuse, try taking your SQL and either putting it into a stored procedure with...

No prob---there's never a better time than now!

It's an interesting case where the optimizer seems to have 2 choices that seem very similar. In situations like this, minor changes in the query, plan cache, or data...

It's difficult to analyze this completely without a representative data set, but from what I see of the tables, statistics, and execution plans, the following can be seen:

1) Seek vs....

I'd be happy to take this one on. This could be kept simple and straightforward:

1. Why are duplicate/overlapping indexes bad?

2. How to locate them.

3. How to resolve/delete to remove...

I'd be interested in taking this. I could write a short piece on viewing statistics and illustrating an example or two as to how they are used.

From there a...

I've been working with Linq-generated SQL for a while and have definitely had similar experiences. When the queries are straight-forward selects on a group of tables with simple joins,...

The big test case to ensure that your new consolidated index is doing what it should would be to execute queries on Column A and Column D and see if...

No prob,

I'll focus briefly on the problems that cursors pose, and present 2 use cases for them---one being a CTE-based solution to the link provided in this post, and another...