Sessions that are sleeping are not doing anything, therefore they cannot be currently using CPU. A session that is currently using CPU is in the RUNNING state.

SOS_Scheduler_Yield is not an...

Define the column as not nullable and specify a default or use ISNULL(<column name>,0) when querying.

Stale stats or bad plan in cache to be honest.

The optimiser has no knowledge of fragmentation, so that won't change plans, usually when rebuild fixes query problems it's actually the...

No. Updating stats on the table updates all the stats on that table, index and column.

If you want to change...

Ed Wagner (11/14/2013)

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If your nonclustered has other columns included, it could prove useful in some queries, but since all nonclustered indexes inherit the value from the clustered index anyway, why...

Are you sure that updating stats with fullscan doesn't help? Changes in estimated rows before/after is usually indicative of statistics-related problem (or bad parameter sniffing).

It doesn't make much sense usually. There are edge cases where the narrow nonclustered index can be useful because it's narrower and hence faster to use, but that requires specific...

Bhuvnesh (11/14/2013)

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You can .... for that you have to do table level changes like merging two tables (which contains parent-child...

All the alter database does is change the default collation that new objects will use. If you want to change existing objects, you need to run an ALTER TABLE ALTER...

Not enough information.

Please post table definitions, index definitions and actual execution plan (as a .sqlplan file)

Remove the hint unless there is no other way to get the optimiser to choose the index that you know to be best, you know why the index you're hinting...

I still recommend considering a check constraint instead of the trigger.

That said, a check constraint would probably be a better choice than a trigger here.

Your trigger is checking the entire table, not the rows just inserted. So if there's any blank values anywhere in the table, the trigger will fail. You probably want to...