If 98% of your customers have short-ish bills and are fine and 2% have long bills and have performance issues, maybe the simplest answer is to do some optimisation specifically...

You can get something close to what you describe with Snapshot Isolation, but ultimately what you are asking for is not what a database is designed to do.

If you enable...

As you have not started your build, I would suggest going straight to SQL 2014.

You will have read about the in-memory and column-store stuff, and they will help...

BTW, I did not explain why we think Always On is the strategic direction... The two reasons are simplicity and SQL 2014.

1) Always On is inherently less work to...

On the face of it, your application was designed to cope with a given volume and your business is now exceeding the design volume of the application.

My advice...

We have used replication for many years and have followed what Microsoft are doing with each SQL release with a lot of interest. Although P2P replication has been introduced...

We currently use P2P replication betwen two AWS availability zones. We also use normal transactional replication to scale out within each AZ to provide enough power to meet our...

We were part of the SQL Server 2012 TAP program and hit this issue. It was raised as Connect item 652849.

The feedback from MS was that replication...

I am not entirely satisfied with the licensing module from MS.

I can't see the point of such a complex license model.

I see the new licensing model as a threat...

You cannot replicate between SQL 2012 and SQL 2005. There is no known way round this that is supported by Microsoft.

SQL 2005 replication depends on the routine DATABASEPROPERTY which...

This type of standardisation may pervent you from getting false negatives based on name, but you are likely to have a significant number of false positives.

Name matching is the easy...

If you are buying new licences then the advise I have had from our MS Licence vendor is you have to comply with SQL 2012 licensing conditions, even if you...

If you are doing this type of forensics, then IMHO this justifies changing a system stored procedure for the duration of the investigation.

Look at the source of sp_removedbreplication and add...

If you get a message that the SQL Edition is not valid for the Windows Edition, then you need to use a different Edition of SQL 2005 that is valid.

If...

You can avoid the learning curve of Metro and give your server a bit more performance by running it in Core mode.

We are only part-way through migrating from W2008R2 to...