Whether running in a VM on Azure, AWS, or locally, a VM is just a VM. You're responsible for your database backups the same way across all of them. The...

I think the topic has strayed from the original question so it may be worth making two points about customer identifiers. Firstly, IDENTITY is likely not very convenient as...

OK, it's not doing the sort operation, but has the query sped up? I'm not comfortable with this solution. The problem you are having is not the sort operation. The...

You could. Depending on what you're doing, that's a lot of data movement

Well, in the two plans you showed, the sort was happening in both, just that one was only moving 9 rows. Is there a different plan?

Thanks for posting those.

The test system is moving 9 rows on an estate of 1.3 million. Production is moving 6.7 million rows on an estimate of 9.3 million. I think,...

They never reported back what the issue was. Usually, it's down to data.

Very good point, as usual.

There's no way to index this that will improve performance. So, you could modify the structure and store a computed column instead of the FUNCAveMile function, which you can...

Best way I can think of is to do a little data exploration so you better understand the table (500+ columns... <sigh>), then, on a TEST system, try creating a...

I'm not aware of a tool that will do the work for you. However, check out DBATools. This software will make the migration easier, if not easy. Here's...

Yep, something is different between the two machines. What? Not a clue. Post the plans. If you need to, use SentryOne's Plan Explorer to anonymize the plans before you post...

Duration & rows returned are in rpc_completed and/or sql_batch_completed Extended Events. That's how I'd capture this data if required. To my knowledge, you're correct, this is absolutely not in the...

Break it all down into pieces for testing. The easy part is the database name of course. But, next, test that you're capturing only statements with ALTER in them. See...

If you do a large scale data purge, you may also see a very empty database file.

Shrinking a file is not the end of the world. If you have, let's...