Shared locks only affect data modification queries. They don't affect other reads, so you have to focus there. The key issue is ensuring that your queries are written well to...

Look up READ COMMITTED SNAPSHOT. That will be a humungous help to you. Just know that it adds overhead to tempdb. However, most people won't even notice.

I'd be really cautious here. You can...

So, before I comment on anything, remember, testing is your best friend in these situations. Anyone can have opinions on behavior. However, you should test those opinions and assumptions against...

First, tell your friend to simply be honest about their knowledge and experience. Next, some good news. To a large degree, SQL Server is SQL Server. Whether we're talking about...

It's a very good idea to have a second copy of your backups anyway. Not all of them every time, but, say, weekly or something. Just so, in the event...

HA!...

No company could have been prepared for this.  And, because of that, I fear that real thought will not be put into the decision about who to get rid...

Well, the big company meeting announcing what changes will be made was held this morning.  I will still have a job, but everyone making over 60k is getting...

Yes!

General Data Protection Regulation, California Citizens Privacy...

Sensitive data should absolutely not be in use in dev & test servers. So that shouldn't be a problem.

Pretty sure it was Jesus who said: You will always have the idiots with you. Or something like that. I'd just say that even with that... individual, better to be...

Nuts. I'm stuck. Have you compared the plans?

Since you can't do a backup & restore locally, you're doing a BACPAC I assume? Since that rebuilds the indexes, it also resets all statistics. I'd focus there as the...

You can't do that.

If you want to, you can:

SELECT @Result = a.SomeColumn
FROM dbo.ATable AS a
WHEREa.id=42;