Find a champion.

You want a high level person with integrity who will work with you and support your efforts. If it's family run, someone in the family. You...

Get a copy of SentryOne Plan Explorer. It's free. Anonymize the plans (it'll clean the query & everything) and then post those. Otherwise, everything everyone is saying is just random...

This is the Minion mentioned above. Worth a look. It's a very viable alternative for most people.

PBM is pretty amazing. Unfortunately it gets extremely little love from Microsoft. There have been additions to it with new functionality, but overall, it gets almost no attention. I don't...

You might want to explore putting this into a columnstore index, see if that helps. It really depends on the types of queries being run against it, but pivoted storage,...

Have you tried capturing sql_batch_completed and rpc_completed (maybe even toss in module_complete) using Extended Events? That's usually what I use.

Monitoring and observing the system will certainly tell you more than I can remotely. The one thing I'll say is that doing a differential every two hours, those differentials at...

No way to say for 100% certain without at least the execution plan, but, best guess, those LEFT functions on the columns are going to lead to index scans. Same...

System processes and other threads.

Why would you immediately run sp_updatestats on slow...

No. It's not the same as measuring threads. It's just the users connected to the database. Generally, there's probably a 1:1 correlation a lot of the time. However, it won't...