although not a direct help on this you may wish to consider testing doing split file backups (not stripped) to see if performance improves.

sometimes it does sometimes it doesn't.

see https://www.sqlservercentral.com/forums/topic/creating-split-backups-question...

openquery uses a linkedserver name - that name DOES NOT need to be the physical server name although when you create it through the gui and you specify it as...

no one can really prepare for something like what we had this year - at least not without spending money that may not ever be needed just for a worst...

you need to shrink files, not database.

example - replace test with your database name on the use statement, and with the logical name of your datafile on the shrinkfile command.

the...

a simple outer apply would do.

single pass on the table and it is clearer than Pivot/unpivot (at least for me)

select CID
     , t.CustType
from...

no matter whether you like it or not, 1)application developers write managed code more; 2)application developers implemented the functions, including FORMAT, CONVERT, CAST, LTRIM, RTRIM, TRIM, LEFT, RIGHT; 3)FORMAT...

I did say reading the manual is advisable.

format 110 will give the mm-dd-yyyy you asked for the other columns.

and easier as you don't need the right function

format is very slow and should be avoided whenever possible.

it does help to read the manual

convert(date, dob, 105) -- 105 format is DD-MM-YYYY

full

select right(convert(char(10), convert(date, dob), 105), 7)

I'm not surprised after those 158 million rows deleted - most likely done all in one go.

depending on your system and on what space it takes on the log file to rebuild your indexes I would reduce the size of the log file - assuming I...

as per documentation (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.data.datarow.itemarray?view=net-5.0) it converts each column of a row onto a  array of objects - and for each row on the recordset being retrieved it adds each column...

you do need to practice more powershell - and try out the combination of commands that you have available to look at the objects returned - main thing is to...

it is on each query as per example on the link I supplied

I think you're correct, you should do this for all tables.  No sense wasting resources scanning a 900-row table either.  Of course that 900 rows could be far larger...

you need to explicitly set the parameters db datatype - see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19891999/how-do-i-force-sqlcommand-to-not-encode-parameters-as-unicode-nvarchar/19892033 for an example