Honestly, testing and experience is going to be the answer. Does it sound like a reasonable approach to me? Yes.

Did you also post this question on Quora? It sounds like one I answered over there. My answer here would be largely the same.

As to a way to dip your...

Side note:

You know the missing index DMVs are just suggestions, right?

Further, there is no correlation between the missing index information and queries. Therefore, you can't know if the missing index...

Yes. The exact same queries you use to look at missing indexes in the boxed SQL Server product. Under the covers, Azure SQL Database is just SQL Server. If ever...

Yeah it's not the compression. That's fine. (although I know where you can get even better than native compression <cough> Redgate </cough>), it's the TDE with compression that can lead...

Don't forget, even with a log file, if the backup process ignored SQL Server transactions, the attach could still fail.

First, you can't do this on a server where the same database already exists. You must be doing this on a new, or different, instance of SQL Server.

Here's how...

While the results may be the same, putting the JOIN criteria and the filtering criteria into the WHERE clause is less clear. I'd always default to having the JOIN criteria...

Check the execution plans, but I'll bet the second choice there performs better.

Not a problem. Niko is the best. It's where I start when I have...

Frederico, do you have any test case to support your speculations?

I (and I guess Jeff Moden too) would be particularly interested in a test script which demonstrates advantages of...

I would still consider them good for history/audit tables as these aren't queried often - saving on space is what would really be important here, not speed of processing...

Columnstore index is a workaround for denormalised data storage.

follow basic data normalisation rules and there won’t be any place for columnstore indexes in your database.

not to mention - you’re...

So, not good for general history/audit tables...

You could certainly query sys.dm_exec_query_stats. That's going to show the queries that are currently in the cache, recent activity. It includes a last execution time too, so you can get...