Ah, I missed this the first time. Sorry.

The Data Migration Assistant is for moving to Azure SQL Database, not to Azure VMs. An Azure VM is just a VM. Moving...

So what are you trying to capture? Is it individual statements from a stored procedure? You're using the sp_statement_completed event. The "sp" at the start stands for stored procedure. If...

Yeah, there are differences and limits on Express. The core behavior is the same, but the amount of memory it can use and other stuff along those lines are different....

I'm interviewing a lot of candidates for a mid-level Production DBA role at the moment, and one of the questions I ask is what's the difference between truncating a...

How are your waits? Are you seeing lags in tempdb? If not, leave it alone. If so, make a change. Guidance on the number of files for tempdb is all...

So, first up, new system, better hardware, but, "we won't like to change any configuration". That's an odd choice.

"We have more memory, but we're going to leave the old memory...

In the vast majority of cases, 2017 is radically faster than 2012. However, in some edge cases, as you may be experiencing, the opposite is true. Usually, this involves situations...

Toss the global field. It's not needed here at all and the global fields are also called Actions because they can act like triggers. I minimize their use as much...

This sounds like a reasonable approach to me. After the archive you might want to shrink the databases a little. I'd also suggest setting up an automated process to continue...

What Jeff said.

Plus, spend as much time learning and practicing your people skills as you do your technical skills. You'll be much more successful if you can communicate well.

I'm assuming by now...

So, we're talking at cross purposes here.

Results to text put the results out as text in the results window. They don't go to any file anywhere. They're just text instead...

It's not about fragmentation. It's about the delta store, the place where the deletes are kept. You want to watch that and rebuild based on clearing that up, not fragmentation.

You may need to set up a linked server on the Azure VM. Use synonyms to dummy out the behavior.

Restores.

Restores matter more than backups. No one cares how good your backups are. They care whether or not you can restore the database. Learn to do restores in your sleep....