I need to get the Unicorn Project and read it.

Piling on because this bears repeating.

Yes, in order to do recovery you need backups. Further, in order to ensure your backups are good, you need to test them regularly. The...

I agree with what Anthony posted above and I would add one wrinkle.

After the upgrade, leave your databases at the old compatibility mode for a period of time. Run Query...

I'm not sure you have a spinlock problem based on what you've posted. I'd suggest more reading here and here (especially Paul's post).

In general, start with wait statistics...

That's not a shock really. But a little more sharing ahead of time, might, might, prevent some outages.

AND

on this note, SQL Server on Edge is now in...

Yeah, that qualifies.

Congrats on the license upgrade. one more level to go.

We aren't Cranky, it's just hard to get people to understand that everything that's new isn't always better or cheaper...

thanks Grant, now I can't CC anyone on an email without feeling guilty (and buying cakes for everyone.)

I used to be cranky, but now i'm the nice DBA who...

Welcome to the...

You have a starting point. There are some primary keys. Heck there are two foreign keys that I saw. So, again, this is largely a paper process to start, spread...

Agreed. Excellent point.

I'll be the angel of death this time:

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-51209197

I'd love to say, he's not quite dead.

Yep. Sorry. Totally got that wrong. I must have been thinking of telnet. Apologies.

Wow. You're in a tough spot. There is a very high likelihood that the business also doesn't know how these tables match. Personally, I'd suggest you bring some tooling into...