Try it with NORECOVERY instead of RECOVER in the restore. leave it in the recovering state until the differential is done.

First, a bit of clarity, the title says "Indexing a character column". Then you type that you want "Indexing on Numeric column types" and then you say that the majority...

Profiler has been deprecated for a long time. However, there is no indication that it will be removed from the product any time soon. That said, don't use it. Extended...

I'd change it. I don't know a good way to optimize rollbacks other than keeping the transactions as small as possible. Instead of rollbacks, can you truncate the test tables...

Depending on the query, your structure, and your data, a scan may be better than a seek. Without seeing your query, structure and execution plan, I can't tell you why...

Most people I know who have large estates purchase a third party tool to help with the management. I know that when I was managing a large SQL Server estate,...

Yahoo?

Is that still a thing?

If the queries are primarily point lookup (one or only a limited set of rows, say hundreds or less), then no, columnstore is a very bad solution for you. If,...

Another possibility is to query the plan cache to see which indexes are in execution plans there. That approach is dependent on the plan being in cache though.

First, on 2016, don't use profiler, use extended events. They are much more light weight than profiler and safer for your system.

I don't know of a way to...