If you are planning to install it on your laptop or personal machine and exclusively used for development you can think of HYPER-V too it help to rebuild the environment...

As you have mention that renaming the stored procedure works fine. Based on this info you can try executing stored procedure with recompile option every time and see if you...

What will be size of Analytic databases? As clound is having some limitations handeling large database in cloud.

How about creating seperate table for SSN and DOB having FK reference as empid? After that these two column can be encrypted. The purpose of creating this table is you...

Can you try running services under local system account?

Easy one, thanks Steve.

Provide more details about function. What kind of function it is? What it is doing? How it is connecting to the database? etc.

SQL Server 2012 support hetrogeneous replication for Oracle Subscriber. SQL supports push subscriptions to Oracle.

Install and configure Oracle client networking software and ORACLE OLE DB on the SQL Server Distributor,...

I am also bit confused; after the upgrade it says db is in 110 compatibility i.e.SQL 2012 while 9481 trace flag will force the query optimizer to use version 70...

Yes, it is possible but slitly different than SQL 2005. Refer following link for further details:

http://databasebestpractices.com/edition-upgrade-sql-server-2008-r2-express-standard-edition/

HTH

Yes, droping and readding after the data load is faster.

It also depends on what kind of information are you capturing in your trace file? What are the counters have you opted in your trace? You can also use filter...

Sometime it is good to have patience as mention by Gail.

What is the database size? Since howlong it is in recovery?

Good one, thanks.

Nice question, thanks.